Creating the fantastic
December 19, 2005 | 12:00am
When I teach fiction writing to undergraduates, I take them through a two-semester program, devoting the first semester to realist and the second to non-realist fiction. My idea is for young writers to develop or at least be aware of basic skills that almost any genre of fiction will require – attention to detail, some notion of dramatic necessity and plausibility, character development, the use of time, the physical setting, and so on – before they move on to experimenting with if not subverting these elements.
It’s an old-fashioned approach, and one that some of my young students understandably chafe under – especially the kind of bright, impatient mind eager to jump into the things most important to him or her, which likely have nothing to do with rendering believable scenes in a painterly sort of way. Granted, there’s always that genius whose time you might be wasting on finger exercises, who has imagined and peopled universes you yourself have never seen; but anyone that good doesn’t need to be in my class, or in a creative writing program for that matter; that person should just go ahead and write, while making good money as a banker or a wine merchant.
On the first day of CW 110, someone in the back row inevitably groans or winces when I announce that, for the time being, I would not be accepting science fiction, fantasy, or magic realist stories; they’d have to wait another semester – or drop the class.
I don’t want to dull or kill anyone’s imagination – people can always write for themselves outside of class, like they did for centuries before creative writing courses became all the rage – but I liken my method to teaching and learning draftsmanship or figure drawing, which every budding architect or artist goes through in school. I’ve also tried to get young writers to realize that it’s a lot more difficult to deal with the here-and-now, with the in-your-face concretion and surface dullness of things, than to invent new civilizations in distant galaxies far, far away. That merely reflects my conviction that a writer’s truest and hardest challenge lies in probing the obvious, the commonplace, the simple, and the uninteresting to reveal its hidden marvels and mysteries.
Somehow this policy seems to have earned me a reputation for being anti-sci-fi or anti-fantasy, which just isn’t true. As a kid, I devoured science fiction, or what there was of it in the 1960s. I was particularly enamored of the Martian series of Edgar Rice Burroughs (yup, the very same one who would create Tarzan in 1912 a year after he introduced John Carter, a Confederate Army captain who, a Burroughs website notes, "is whisked to Mars and discovers a dying world of dry ocean beds where giant four-armed barbarians rule, of crumbling cities home to an advanced but decaying civilization, a world of strange beasts and savage combat, a world where love, honor and loyalty become the stuff of adventure…. Without Burroughs there probably never would have been Star Wars!"). The Martian or "Barsoomian" books, numbering 11 (I read them all, and still have a copy of Llana of Gathol), would later be acknowledged by Ray Bradbury and Carl Sagan among their seminal influences, so vivid and compelling was Burroughs’ imagination.
Ialso plowed through the Tom Swift series – he was a boy-gadgeteer and adventurer – and picked up what stray issues of pulp sci-fi magazines I could find on C. M. Recto, encountering such masters as Robert Heinlein, Frederick Pohl, Isaac Asimov, and, of course, Bradbury (whom I would later discover was a terrific writer as well of conventional fiction). For some odd reason, I missed out completely on Tolkien and C.S. Lewis and on Alice in Wonderland, for that matter; I guess I was a hardware kind of guy even then, for whom E.T. did nothing and Star Wars looked like a toy store gone amuck, but who sat through 2001: A Space Odyssey and the whole Aliens series spellbound.
I graduated from a science high school and might’ve been a biologist or an engineer if my math grades were any better; so why didn’t I do sci-fi when I made up my mind to become a writer? Partly, it had to have been because of my involvement with the Left in the 1970s, imbibing its heavy emphasis on realism (or a variety of it); and in graduate school in the US in the 1980s, minimalism (yet another, dehydrated, version of realism) was king. The other reason was that I didn’t have any good local models to work with or work from, and I think it’s because science fiction requires, well, a certain level of science and a scientific consciousness to seize the popular imagination. We Pinoys seem more receptive and attuned to fantasy and romance – less of the futuristic than the medieval kind (of which, on the other hand, modern epics like Star Wars are just high-tech remakes).
And there’s my problem with some of the sci-fi (or, to enlarge the concept, the speculative fiction) that I’ve come across in my classes, in workshops, and in the occasional magazine or journal. The stories can be too plainly derivative, unimaginative, juvenile, and even downright incredible. Of course you can say that as well for many drafts of realist stories I get in class, but I tend to expect more from speculative fiction, precisely because it’s pushing the horizons of the possible. The strain often shows in stories that spend an awful amount of time and detail on "worlding" or the creation of new life-forms, societies (utopian or dystopian), social rules, and technical gadgetry without paying enough attention to the human drama at the very core of things. Secondly, as though flustered by our scientific and economic backwardness, some authors have chosen to deny our realities altogether, fast-forwarding into the distant future and bleeding nearly everything Filipino out of their stories.
To this I’ve responded with a challenge that my students have coming out of their ears: write me a marvelous, credible sci-fi or fantasy story that takes place, say, at a Jollibee outlet in Cubao. In other words, turn everyday grime into fairy dust.
I’m glad that, whether they heard me or not, young Filipino authors are beginning to create and define a distinctly Filipino brand of speculative fiction. A few years ago, while judging for the Palancas, one story I was impressed by had a band of space travelers thinking that they had gone back in time to witness the crucifixion of Jesus Christ – not realizing that they were watching a Pinoy senakulo at Lenten season. One of the most memorable stories in this year’s batch of NCCA Writer’s Prize submissions was one that revisited Jose Rizal’s execution at Bagumbayan, as observed and monitored by more sentient beings. (Not all sci-fi is futuristic; Ursula K. Le Guin’s magnificent "Sur: A Summary Report of the Yelcho Expedition to the Antarctic, 1909-1910," published in 1982, has nine South American women reaching the South Pole ahead of everyone else, only to keep it a secret – "feminizing," as the critics would say, "a masculine legend.")
And today we have new cause for celebration, with the recent launch of Philippine Speculative Fiction Volume 1, edited by Dean Francis Alfar. The 200-plus-page book (published by Kestrel, Inc., and available for P300 at all Fully Booked and Comic Quest branches) features the work of 18 young Filipinos – some younger, some better known than others, but all of them imbued with the same visionary zeal that the editor (last year’s grand prize winner for the novel in English in the Palancas) is making a name for. The back-cover blurb declares that "Between these covers you will find magic realism next to science fiction, traditional fantasy beside slipstream, and imaginary worlds rubbing shoulders with alternate Philippine history – demonstrating that the literature of the fantastic is alive and well in the Philippines."
Dean, whom I first met in a UP Writers Workshop many years ago, is proving to be a powerful and positive influence over a group of young authors and artists dedicated to new forms of and new directions in Philippine writing, beyond the sometimes stolid realism that I and my generation of writers espouse. (His wife Nikki, herself a Palanca prizewinner, shares in this mission.) While paying homage to their elders and precursors like Alfred Yuson and Rosario Lucero, these young writers are seeking to write what Alfar calls a true "literature of the fantastic – unashamedly magical, beyond lyricism and tenor and style." Dean explains further: "To find the fantastic, we must create the fantastic. We must write it ourselves, develop it brick by enchanted brick. We must write literature that unabashedly revels in wonder, infused with the culture of our imagination – which means being Filipino and, at the same time, surrendering that very same limiting notion – being more than Filipino, unleashing the Filipino of our imagination, divorcing and embracing the ideas of identity, nationhood and universality. We need to do magic."
The authors in this volume – the first of a planned annual series – are Cyan Abad-Jugo, Angelo R. Lacuesta, Ian Rosales Casocot, Nikki Alfar, Francezca C. Kwe, Vincent Michael Simbulan, Douglas L. Candano, J. Pocholo Martin Goitia, Joseph Nacino, Gabriela Lee, Tyron Caliente, Pauline Orendain, Khavn, K. Mandigma, Sean Uy, Jay Steven Uy Anyong, Andrew Drilon, and Dean Alfar.
Good luck, guys. I was always more of a Star Trek than a Star Wars fan, but may the Force, as they say, be with you.
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