writing and reading sci-fi, fantasy, and nonfiction
Author: Liz Busby
Liz Busby is a writer of creative non-fiction, technical writing, and speculative fiction. She loves reading science fiction, fantasy, history, science writing, and self help, as well as pretty much anything that holds still for long enough.
I’m currently watching the Netflix adaptation of The Three Body Problem (or 3 Body Problem, as they have styled the title). The dialogue and exposition writing is so much better than the recent Avatar: The Last Airbender that I could cry. I finished episode six last night, and it’s taking a lot of my willpower bandwidth to continue working on schoolwork instead of finishing the final two episodes. It’s been a while since I read Liu Cixin’s book, and I have not read the other two books in the series, though with the amount of enjoyment I am getting from the show, they may move to the top of my summer reading list.
With all those caveats on my own ignorance in place, I’ve noticed an interesting religious theme in the show. In the first episode, Vera, a scientist who’s shortly going to commit suicide, asks another, “Do you believe in God?” This question is seemingly related to the fact that the particle accelerator they both work at is spitting out “Alice in Wonderland”-type results, like all the other colliders in the world. This implies that the only reason to consider religion is because you encounter things that don’t make sense.
Revelations in the show make it seem likely that Vera, like another protagonist, has also encountered a mysterious human who tells her that “the Lord” will take care of her if she stops her research and perhaps force her to commit suicide if she doesn’t. Later, it becomes clear what this group of fanatics refer to as “the Lord” is actually a group of technologically advanced aliens. This is a common enough science fiction explanation for God, but what makes this framing interesting to me is that these humans know that their Lord is a group of aliens. They are under no illusions that anything supernatural is going on. All of the aliens’ marvelous capabilities are scientific in their minds, and yet they still frame the aliens as a god, one who cares deeply about humanity’s best interests, and worship them accordingly.
I’ll keep this summary short since it’s April and all the grad school papers are due in a couple of weeks. During March, I presented at both the BYU English Symposium and the International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. You can read my notes about ICFA over here.
Since I was already in Florida, I also took the chance to slip away by myself to Epcot without kids. I ate way too many snacks at the Flower and Garden Festival and spent my time in line listening to books for class on headphones, but a break is a break!
Obligatory picture with the giant golf ball at Epcot
Over on the podcast, I highly encourage you to check out our exploration of Pride and Prejudice adaptations featuring the wonderful Katherine Cowley, author of The Secret Life of Mary Bennet mystery series. We’re hard at work on some fun episodes that should come out with greater frequency once winter semester ends.
I’ve recently returned from the 45th International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Since I’m an introvert and have to push myself to network, I set a goal before the conference to talk to three new people each day and have at least one interesting conversation. Well, that goal was absolutely an underestimate of how much fun I had talking to all these wonderful scholars and creatives. It was an absolute dream to attend. When you want to study fantasy and science fiction, there are a lot of people in English departments who won’t take you seriously. Being in a place where everyone else is also interested in what speculative fiction has to say was so refreshing.
My presentation was part of a panel of two papers on Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi. It was a fascinating panel in that my co-presenter and I came to exactly opposite conclusions about whether the novel supported or denied the idea of Escape into the fantastic, as theorized by Tolkien. John Pennington (whose work on George McDonald I’m going to have to look into when I finally get around to reading Phantasties) framed the novel as rejecting the premise of a secondary world in favor of a world that is deeply intertwined with, and even formed from, the primary world. He also cited a lot of postsecular theorists in his discussion, which gave me a whole different way to understand the book that I’m going to need to spend some time working on.
My paper, “‘The Beauty of the House is Immeasurable’: Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi on the Uses of Speculative Fiction for Escape During the Covid Pandemic,” took an opposite tack. I looked at the relationship of the protagonist to the artistic and symbolic world he lived in as representative of our relationship with speculative fiction, coming to the conclusion that the book demonstrates how Tolkien’s idea of constructive Escape functions. I tied in the public reaction to the book when it was published in the early pandemic as well as my own experiences using media to cope with 2020.
I was blown away by the discussion which brought up ideas that could spark at least 3-4 other papers about the novel. (Edited collection on Piranesi, anyone?) It was an honor to be in a panel with such an intelligent audience. I felt like I finally experienced the purpose of an academic conference: getting feedback on your ideas from people who really care about the subject.
David G Hartwell Award co-winners, Liz Busby and Sasha Bailyn
I guess the people running the conference also liked my paper, because at the closing banquet, I received the David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award, along with Sasha Bailyn, whose interesting publication Inglenook Lit combines creative nonfiction and speculative fiction which blows my mind. I’m really honored by this award; it gives me real validation and encouragement for my crazy desire to spend the rest of my career focused on speculative fiction.
Below are some comments and notes on my favorite papers and panels that I attended. (There were so many good panels that I didn’t get a chance to attend as well!)
February was a busy month outside of school. My presentations at LTUE 42 went well and I had fun meeting up with old friends. I read from my essay “Through the Wardrobe: Inhabiting the Divine Story” at the Wayfare issue 3 launch party; I’m always impressed by the quality of writers they find, so I’m very humbled to be among them. Check out the previews of issue 3 (including this amazing art combining The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe and the Kirtland temple that was commissioned to go with my piece) and consider subscribing to get one of the beautiful print copies.
Close up of art by Jessica Beach
This month I’ll be presenting a paper on using CS Lewis’s interpretation of Spenser’s Faerie Queene to understand the poetry of another early modern poet, Amelia Lanyer, at BYU’s English Symposium. I’ll also be travelling to Florida to attend the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts and read my paper on Susanna Clarke’s Piranesi and using speculative fiction to cope with trauma. So many conferences this semester! Remind me to limit myself to one next time.
The podcast has been a little dormant due to grad school, but we did release a short today on a short Pixar film called Self. The episode is twice as long as the film itself; we do some interesting twisting of the short into a religious reading that the filmmakers certainly didn’t intend. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it, and we’ll get back to more regular episodes soon.
I also made a concerted effort this month to revive my non-school related reading. I find that reading for school becomes more interesting when I have things from my own interests to connect with it. So even though February is a short month, I’ve got 10 book reviews for you. Let’s jump to it!
Last week, I was really excited to watch the Netflix live-action adaptation of Avatar: The Last Airbender. I had been skeptical when the original show creators departed, but they’d earned back a bit of trust with the amazing trailers they released. I had hopes that even though I knew they would change some aspects of the series, they would still get the vision of it and make it more accessible to adults who are still too self-conscious to watch a “kids show.” My husband and I set out to watch the first episode for date night. We popped popcorn and everything.
Within about 20 minutes of the first episode, it was clear that Netflix had absolutely flubbed this adaptation. The fantasy fan criticizing the adaptation of their beloved property is cliche, but the recent string of Hollywood misses on big-budget fantasy projects is hard to miss. While Stranger Things, Shadow and Bone, and Arcane have done well, Rings of Power and The Wheel of Time have been notable failures, both artistically and financially. This mixed bag of major successes and failures is made worse than typical streaming shows because of the big investment that these series represent.
If we don’t want Hollywood to stop making fantasy (and science fiction) properties, they’ve got to learn to do this better. Some errors that future adaptations should avoid, with examples from Netflix’s Avatar:
Too much time gawking at the fantasy elements – The first two Harry Potter movies are nigh unto unwatchable because they spend so much time being amazed at the Wizarding World (which admittedly was so cool to see on screen) and neglect to move the plot along. There seems to be a belief in Hollywood that fantasy TV exists as a vehicle for cool special effects rather than for the same reason all film exists: to convey a story. If you don’t get the story right, no one is going to care how cool your costumes and special effects are. The Avatar YouTube channel is full of cool behind the scenes videos about the bending and other worldbuilding stuff, and the show also spends a lot of its screen time on wide shots of cool stuff while rushing through the dialogue and plot.
Not trusting the audience to get the worldbuilding: One major fault with Netflix’s Avatar is the way it explains all the background explicitly instead of letting the audience piece it together slowly. We get the explanation of the four nations and the Avatar at least three times in-world in the first episode. While info-dumping is always a storytelling no-no, it seems prevalent in fantasy adaptations, maybe because the people working on them aren’t used to the genre conventions for gradual explanations of world-building. The key is to reveal things when the audience has a reason to want to understand them, which is not necessarily when the audience first sees them. If we can wait to gradually understand that Ted Lasso’s marriage is on the rocks over several episodes, we can also wait for several episodes to understand Zuko’s motivation for chasing the Avatar.
Changing major plot points or character arcs: A movie is like a cookie recipe. You can easily substitute the chocolate chips, but if you want to change the flour or go vegan, beware. Look, I get that some things have to be cut and adapted in the move from book to film. It’s a different medium with different strengths: it can’t do interiority as well as a book, but it can cover description so much more compactly. But the original property worked not because of the fantasy concept but because of the story. The character arcs of Aang and Sokka were probably more crucial to the original series’ success than Netflix’s adaptation realized, and cutting them undermined so many other aspects of the story that they tried to keep. When you change endings or character arcs, that change alters not just one scene but the whole balance of the story. It takes a lot of skill to make that kind of change work. Unless you’ve written an original best-selling novel or show, you probably don’t have it. Have some humility. Otherwise, you look like the people in the recipe comments section who substitute five ingredients and then complain that the cookies didn’t turn out.
Get the tone right: By itself, fantasy is not a tone. Fantasy can be gritty, optimistic, mysterious, or zany. When the Netflix creators kept using Game of Thrones as a touchstone for the audience they wanted to reach, we should have known they had drunk too much cactus juice. An adult fantasy property is not automatically Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings. A YA fantasy property isn’t automatically Harry Potter or Hunger Games. Comp titles should match the overall tone of the show rather than just glomming on to the most successful fantasy craze you can think of.
As a fan of Brandon Sanderson, I’m sort of glad that he hasn’t gotten an adaptation yet; the chances for a failure are so high. It’s a large book with a ton of interconnecting plots and pieces going on, and an adaptation has so many people working on it with so many chances to not get it. Still, I’ve been rereading to prepare for the release of Wind and Truth in December, and I couldn’t resist taking my own stab at what a faithful adaptation of The Way of Kings that takes into account the differences in medium might look like. I’ve gotten some interesting feedback on it over on reddit. Perhaps you could help me improve it?
