- Unreality Effect
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- The idea of a forest
(Hi! I hope your June has been chill! No new stories out this month, just nonfiction—an essay on specificity and the environment in speculative fiction. Still working through these thoughts, so bear with me.)
There are woods aplenty in fantasy and science fiction. Above them all, Tolkien's old growth European forests loom. Echoes of his trees repeat endlessly in the genre. The collective landscape of fantasy is littered with mist-wreathed mountains and golden-boughed woods. It's not just plants. European foxes, stags, and wolves forever flit through our fantastical ecosystems, darting among a laundry list of flowers that could be drawn from any English gardening manual: roses, daffodils, peonies.
Occasionally you'll see a different kind of forest, of course. SFF as a genre owes a debt to the adventure novel of the 19th and early 20th centuries, and as a consequence, white authors are forever stocking their invented worlds with thick jungles teeming with stinging insects and dangerous fauna. Tigers, jaguars, and snakes, oh my! The exoticized jungle is an ever-popular vacation destination for adventuring heroes, especially if a one-dimensional caricature of a tribal community can be tossed into the mix to provide extra danger or dispense canned wisdom. Every now and then the jungle will shed its skin and take on the guise of the swamp instead, adopting a minutely different aesthetic but keeping the same thematic core.
These fictionalized depictions rarely ring true for anyone who has ever lived in or near a jungle or a swamp. The experiential reality of moving through a real mangrove forest, for example, is rarely reflected in Western fantasy or science fiction. Instead, these narratives draw upon the abstracted idea of the jungle, a flimsy one-dimensional thing filtered through travelogues and action movies.
To state the obvious: you can write a jungle without it being terrible. Plenty of people have. My point here is not so much that white authors continue to be white, which we already knew, but that speculative biomes draw upon other speculative biomes more often than they draw upon the real world.
This isn’t an inherent evil; genres are by definition ongoing conversations in which texts reference and layer upon each other, building a collective megatext. It’s natural for fictional environments to be reflections of other fictional environments. But the ceaseless re-inscription of the same landscapes into the genre’s fabric has led to a curious flattening effect. The unruly physicality of the real world is smushed into a handful of tired images, their enchantment dulled from overuse. A towering oak, a blooming rose—there is power and wonder to be found in these images, but it grows harder and harder to find with each appearance, like a song stuck on repeat until its catchiness drains away. Melody becomes noise.
When I open recent fantasy novels and find the protagonist wandering through yet another version of Tolkien’s forests, I can’t help but wonder: has the author actually been to a place like the one they’re depicting? Not that they need to produce a stamped passport before being Allowed to write, but—why return to that particular imagined landscape and not a more personal and familiar one? I live in Southern California; why do many of my fellow Californian writers make their fictional mountains echoes of the Alps rather than the Sierra Nevadas? Where is the coastal grassland, the chaparral with the heady scent of sage in the air? Where are the eucalyptus groves, the manzanitas with their blood-red limbs? Why are the poppies so often implicitly the deep crimson flowers of Flanders, and not the cup-of-gold that blooms the color of sunlight along the western coast of Mexico and the United States?
This phenomenon is at least partly due to… is habit the right word? To successfully write within a genre, you have to internalize it. You have to live within its patterns—its tropes, its arcs, its conversations. At a certain point trends become simply the way things are. Forests in SFF are like that because they’re always like that. In a story that isn’t really about ecology or landscape, I can see why a writer might not feel the need to reinvent the wheel.
But so much SFF is about the landscape. Many speculative texts that aren’t “ecofiction” per se are still invested in the vibrancy of the natural world. How many times have we read stories in which a special herb must be harvested for its plot-relevant properties, or in which something strange and magical can only be found in the heart of the woods? In these narratives, wonder and enchantment is attached to the general concept of capital-N Nature, but lowercase nature is often set aside in favor of a diluted, abstract idea that has trickled down from other texts.
I keep returning to Tolkien here, and I don’t mean to imply that he was the only guy to ever leave an imprint on the genre or to ever talk about trees, but I can’t help but see his legacy lurking underneath so many of contemporary fantasy’s environments, lingering in the soil. And I can’t help but suspect that this state of affairs, this particular form his legacy has taken, is due to a collective incomprehension of why, exactly, the forests of The Lord of the Rings are so magical.
Sometimes it feels as if we all decided that the reason Lothlórien remains so vibrant in fantasy’s collective consciousness was the mallorn trees themselves and not the way Tolkien wrote about them. Sometimes it’s like we’re all pretending that what gives “The Song of Beren and Lúthien” its sense of wonder is the linden leaves or the hemlock-umbels, and not the delicate, sensitive attention that the narrative grants them. It’s narratorial sleight of hand: a reader is tricked into believing that wonder comes from what is being looked at, rather than from the act of looking itself. And the strength of Tolkien’s narratorial gaze lies in his attentiveness to real-world forests, real-world beauty. And so I can’t help but feel keenly when a story that hopes to invoke a sense of wonder and fascination with the natural world lacks any meaningful touchstone with real-world environments.
Perhaps this aching absence is rooted in the fact that many people feel disconnected from their environment. Many people feel that they need to travel to some far-off location in order to Experience Nature, which is somehow believed to be distant, removed, foreign. Perhaps in the same way, many writers feel that they need to reach for landscapes that other authors have already made magical, rather than seeking out the root of wonder itself.
We are desensitized to our local flora and fauna. The raccoons rooting through our garbage are pests, not clever neighbors with their own fascinating social structures. The agave in our sidewalk planters is the “before” photo of a syrup sold in Trader Joe’s, not a profoundly weird succulent that gets more science fictional the closer you look. (Google “agave in bloom,” if you’ve never seen it—that thing looks like an alien!) It’s true: there’s no substitute for standing in the shade of Yosemite’s sequoias or hiking through Finland’s national parks. Ecoregions are simply not interchangeable; no place is a substitute for another. But every neighborhood, no matter how urban, is home to thousands of species with their own potential to fascinate.
I often think about how much richer fantasy and science fiction could be if more writers drew deliberately upon their own engagement with their local landscape, rather than reaching toward landscapes that other people have already imagined and re-imagined for them. But I don’t want to phrase this as a call for “authenticity,” whatever that means, or as a didactic command to “write what you know.” Those concepts have always been on shaky ground in conversations about the speculative. So here’s another way to put it: I wish that speculative writers considered their options more seriously. I wish that speculative landscapes didn’t keep defaulting to factory settings.
Even now I’m not sure that my focus on wonder and enchantment is the right way to go about this conversation. I worry that by positioning enchantment as an ideal, I obscure the heart of the matter, which has more to do with the materiality of the lived environment being flattened into an idea. Wonder is not the only useful way to approach the landscape, real or fictionalized, and in some respects it may even be woefully inadequate. But I’m still articulating these thoughts, so for now I’ll leave it there.
Other news
Nearly a decade after everyone already read Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy, I’m giving it a shot. (I was familiar with him via his editing work and nonfiction rather than his fiction, which I get the impression is the opposite of most people’s journey through his work.) My ongoing threads of craft notes + literary analysis + general thoughts:
Notes on Annihilation
Notes on Authority
Notes on Acceptance to come later