One of the panels at ReaderCon 23 has stuck with me, especially in the light of ongoing controversies involving country music songs. I’ll put the program description here:
The emergence and predominance of cities in Western culture has been seen variously as a spiritual loss and as humanity’s greatest achievement. In speculative fiction, Terri Windling and others have suggested that fantasy’s roots lie in oral and rural traditions, while China Miéville and others depict cities as cosmopolitan and innovative, unlike the country. How do these and other city-country narratives inform worldbuilding in current speculative fiction? And how can speculative fiction shape our understandings of the possibilities of city and country life?
I could understand Miéville being mentioned – it’s hard to leave out an author who has a book called The City & The City in a conversation like this – but I find it interesting that Terri Windling was brought in as a representative of the other side when, without her, we would not have the Bordertown anthologies and, likely, urban fantasy as we know it.
I love the write up of the first Bordertown collection: “On the border between the World and Elfland sits Bordertown, a place of half-lit neighborhoods of hidden magic, of flamboyant artists and pagan motorcycle gangs. Bordertown is a hothouse laboratory for the return of magic to the life of the World–and the return of life to magic. It’s an attitude and a state of mind. It’s where magic meets rock & roll.”
Doesn’t sound like idyllic country life, does it? Sounds kinda like Greenwich Village back in its heyday. (They actually interviewed folks to promote a new anthology using comments about coming to Greenwich Village. ‘Don’t go there! It’s not what it used to be.’)
That’s not to say there aren’t currents in life which posit ‘small town’ life as the idea compared to the crowded, depraved, foreigner-filled world of the city. There are also views of small towns as insular, dangerous, violent and racist. Even in the most pastoral of fictions, the cozy country mystery, things like the village fete or the annual cider festival hide sex, murder, and depravity.
I think the focus on urban versus rural – settings in specific – ignores the real conflict here: Communities, and who gets to define them, and who benefits from them.
That is the power folks are arguing over. By saying a Community looks and acts a certain way, it allows you to deny the protections of that community to people you don’t like. For some, a community looks like the ‘small town’ in country songs – which can be everything from the ‘don’t come around here no more’ song to ballads about harvest moon dances.
For others, Community looks like someone jumping off a boat and swimming across a river to help a person caught in a lopsided brawl – all because they tried to move an illegally parked raft.
In the end, we need to decide which community do we want. We need to create narratives about communities of all sizes, and shapes, where we don’t, to paraphrase N.K. Jemisin get to “vote on who counts as people.” And we need to stop buying into binaries. Otherwise, community will become an empty word. Or, as one of my favorite films, Three Days of the Condor, says about the intelligence field:
“Community? Community?! Jesus, you’re kind to each other.”
Biomechanoid Blues 