the lowercase

There’s a lot you can say about Washington DC — and we know, not all of it’s good. For most outside the beltway* our little city is synonymous with just one thing: crazy politics. But we don’t want you to get the wrong impression, because we’ve got culture, too! Really. No, seriously. And for science fiction and fantasy fans, we’re almost a mecca. Okay, maybe not, but imagine your Comic-Con cred if you tell your fellow line buddies outside Hall H that you’ve seen a few of these sights.

The Space Shuttle Enterprise
Yeah, we’ve got that. It’s spent years locked away in a hangar at Dulles airport but is now on display nearby at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center — an annex to the National Air and Space Museum on the Mall — located about 40 minutes outside Washington. And bonus! You can visit the hangar were parts of Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen were filmed. Public transit to Dulles is tricky… your best bet is to start at the Air and Space Museum downtown and pick up one of their shuttle guides for details on how to get out Udvar-Hazy Centr. Better yet, if you’re flying through Dulles, make it a stop into or out of town.

The Exorcist Steps
Fantasy and horror more your thing? Not a straight science fiction guy? Okay. Then the power of Christ compels you to visit this movie landmark in Georgetown, one of Washington DC’s upscalest neighborhoods. Avoid these suckers in high heels, while drunk and if Linda Blair is around. They’re pretty steep. Take the Circulator (those red busses you see every where) to get to Georgetown and head ove to 36th St and M St NW . The trip is $1 each way.

Dupont Circle
Remember the landmark series The X-Files? The predecessor of modern long-arc serial science fiction dramas like Lost and Fringe ? Sure you do. In the series, Dr. Kurtzweil, the informant for the Syndicate, has an office just off this historic thoroughfare. Dupont connects so many Washington DC streets we can’t keep them all straight… no pun intended, but Dupont is also Washington’s oldest and best-known gay hotspot. The circle is right off the Red Line, though you’ll need to take the Q Street exit and walk south (the only other exit is closed for the next year). History aside, Dupont is also just a great place to sit on a sunny day, and the free wi-fi will keep you entertained if the people watching doesn’t.

The Willard Room
This 3000 square foot banquet room at the Willard Intercontinental Hotel in downtown Washington was the scene of a premature celebration in The Minority Report . This hotel has more than a bit of science fiction history attached, though — Martin Luther King penned his “I Have a Dream” speech as a guest here and Mark Twain wrote two books while staying at the Willard in the 1900s. At 1401 Pennsylvania Avenue NW, a room in the hotel will put you close to the White House and another science fiction setting: Federal Triangle, where the Reagan Trade Building doubled as The Minority Report’s Department of Pre-Crime.

The National Archives
Located just off the National Mall, behind the National Gallery, the Archives played a prominent role in the first National Treasure movie (aside from all the scenes in the building, a lot was shot outside, on Pennsylvania Avenue, too). Okay, it’s not fantasy or sci-fi, but will you give us alternate history? While you’re there, soak up some real history. The Archives hold not only the Declaration of Independence, but the United States Constitution and the Magna Carta, too. Admission is free, but get there early — there’s a line for entrance during tourist season in the spring and summer.

The President’s Gallery
The painting of Theodore Roosevelt at the Portrait Gallery in Chinatown featured prominently in the Ben Stiller and Amy Adams fantasy adventure-comedy (their words, not ours) Night at the Museum 2 . Other Smithsonian artifacts that inspired the film’s writers were Dorothy’s ruby slippers in the American History Museum and the T-Rex skeleton in the Natural History Museum, all within walking distance of each other on the National Mall (hit the Portrait Gallery first by taking the Yellow / Green Line to Chinatown, then walk south down 7th Street to hit up the other museums).

*Washington DC is surrounded by a six-lane highway affectionately known as the Beltway. It’s also called “oh my God why am I driving on this thing” or, alternatively, at rush hour, “damnit, I’m so sick of sitting on this thing.”

—Justin McLachlan

lbgale:

I think if someone asked me what a “typical” SF/fantasy novel would look like, I’d answer that it would be a narrative of linear events told by an unobtrusive third person.  Something with the narrative simplicity of The Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.  I don’t think I’d be alone in providing such an answer.  We tend to associate the most basic storytelling with third person narration, no matter what the genre.  Or, if not third person, at least a first person narration told from the point of view of the main character, like The Hunger Games.

But historically, that is not necessarily the norm.  Many of the SF/fantasy classics on which the genres owe their roots followed more complicated narrative styles.  Perhaps the best example is Stoker’s Dracula, where the story emerges from bits and pieces of different characters’ journals, letters, newspaper clippings, and memos.  That kind of narrative removal is seen as well in Wells’ Time Machine, Shelley’s Frankenstein, and Haggard’s She.  This is similar to today’s “found footage” film genre.

In each of those three novels the reader is introduced to a character who starts off as the first person narrator, then our narrator meets someone with a story to tell, and from that point out the bulk of the story is our first person’s account of the storyteller’s retelling of his adventure.   So basically, they make use of the “frame story” structure of a story within a story.  She differs from The Time Machine and Frankenstein only in that the story within the story is not told by another person, but is actually written into a narrative that our first person narrative only needed to edit here and there.

Part of the reason we see this pattern in form in these classic SF/fantasy novels is certainly due to literary fads and conventions of the nineteenth century, but it would be lame to write off the trend as merely symptomatic of what was popular at the time without looking deeper into why it worked so well and helped immortalize these particular classics.  Why a frame story?  Why a narrative removal through different mediums and different storytellers?  Why didn’t Wells, Shelley, Stoker, and Haggard just give the narrative burden to the person who ends up sharing his tale within a tale instead of to the nobodies we meet in the frame sections?

Though we’ll never know the definitive answer, it’s definitively true that part of the success of each of these SF/fantasy classics is a due to how their narrative styles help absorb readers’ moments of disbelief.  When dealing with the fantastic, SF/fantasy writers are always asking their readers to suspend reality.  Having an outsider as a narrator to share his perspective on the tale after being convinced of its authenticity helps make the lack of realism seem more believable.

Haggard’s She deals with this especially well through the frame story device.  Not only do we have the outsider as narrator in the frame section of the novel introduce the events to give us a release valve for our skepticism, but once this narrator offers us a look into the manuscript of the actual adventure story written by someone else we immediately get another story folded within that story of the origins of the adventure itself.  It is there, in that extra level of removal that bypasses the original narrator and the narrator of the manuscript to a third narrator, that the reader learns the most unrealistic essentials of the story’s background.  And that makes it an easier to accept the fantasy elements because Haggard gets the chance to show the second narrator’s skepticism to what he’s just heard.  Read the passage below and note how the list of the things the narrator has been asked to believe get incrementally more ridiculous:

“The whole story, on reflection, seemed to me utterly incredible….Was it likely that a man would have a son five years of age whom he had never seen since he was a tiny infant?  No.  Was it likely that he could foretell his own death so accurately?  No.  Was it likely that he could trace his pedigree for more than three centuries before Christ, or that he would suddenly confide the absolute guardianship of his child, and leave half his fortune, to a college friend?  Most certainly not.”

Yet somehow the speaker comes to accept it, and we, as the reader, are encouraged by his example to do the same.

The pattern of classic SF/fantasy novels incorporating various forms of media - diary entries, newspaper articles, unpublished manuscripts, etc. - to tell parts of the story has a similar effect.  The multiplicity of sources works like having an exhaustive bibliography.  Who’s going to doubt you, when you have twenty sources to back you up?

It also works to make the final work a bit more mysterious.  Stoker’s Dracula, with all its shifts in mediums, gives readers’ a sense that there is no narrator.  The story is bigger than a narrator.  It can only be comprehended by patching together multiple narrators, as if you can only approach the tale obliquely, like how Marion and Indy have to shield their eyes from the seeing the arc of the covenant lest it burn their brains out.  That indirect gaze we are forced to follow helps keep out of our direct line of sight some of cheesy or implausible aspects of the Dracula story.

Although these classic storytelling techniques might seem outdated and overly complicated to modern readers and writers, it’s useful to reflect on how much formal experimentation has always been at the heart of the SF/fantasy genres.  At what point did we decide that straight third person narration or protagonist-centric first person was the golden standard?

When Wells, Stoker, Shelley, and Haggard were writing, they were essentially creating a new genre, whether they knew it or not.  They had to do the work of trying to convince readers that something fantastical was worth suspending your sense of realism over.  If they just wrote the fantasy/SF tale at the heart of their novels without these stylistic layers they would simply be creating new fairy tales - a cute little bit of whimsy to amuse children.  Instead, they built up a sophisticated readership interested in stories that were completely unreal, yet somehow completely believable, which is good fantasy and science fiction at its heart.

Maybe one can argue that the genres have simply gotten more sophisticated; that they don’t need to depend on narrative and structural tricks and can dive right into strict third person/first person narratives right away.  But it seems more likely that the evolution from these classic novels’ formal trends to modern novels’ formal trends has less to do with the writers getting more sophisticated and more to do with the genres becoming more established.  By now, the fantasy and science fiction genres are literary fixtures with their own conventions and reader expectations.  Stephanie Meyer didn’t need to include a frame story to Twilight to allay reader skepticism over the realism of Edward’s sparkly vampire nature because readers of fantasy and SF know what they are getting into.  They know they need to suspend their sense of realism before even picking up a book.  Wells, Haggard, Stoker, and Shelley had to deal with all kinds of anxiety over believability that us modern SF/fantasy writers don’t even have to worry about…thanks to the genre-building work of Wells, Haggard, Stoker, and Shelley themselves!

Original Article

Here’s some new books authors and publishers are giving away on Goodreads. Some of these end soon, so be sure and move quick:

• Parallelogram: Book 1: Into the Parallel (Volume 1) 
  by Robin Brande
  A giveaway for science fiction fans who want some adventure and romance to go with their quantum physics. Win signed copies of the first two installm…more
• Dragon Academy 
  by Diane Nelson 
  With high school finished for the summer, Nick looks forward to visiting his aunt and uncle in New Jersey. What awaits him is a heat wave like no othe…more
• Necropolis 
  by Michael Dempsey
  In a future where death is a thing of the past, how far would you go to solve your own murder? Paul Donner is a NYPD detective strugglin…more
• The Elf Girl 
  by Markelle Grabo
  Enter to win a signed copy of The Elf Girl! With her pale skin, emerald eyes, and pointy ears, Ramsey’s life has never been normal. When sh…more