The Time of Monsters (part 3)

(second part of the series is here)

 

Synthesis

 So there are two implicit referential strands in Delicious in Dungeon: Lovecraft and Tolkien.  How are these brought together?

Before getting into this, one final side alley: to illuminate a better example of some popular genre, it's sometimes good to look at an absolutely bargain basement lowest common denominator one: I give you "The Strongest Tank’s Labyrinth Raids  -A Tank with a Rare 9999 Resistance Skill Got Kicked from the Hero’s Party", an isekai title which looks like it was put together by randomly selecting tropes that are currently popular.  The minor variation that minutely separates this from similar series is that the main character is a "tank" (as opposed to a healer, a tamer, a mage, a thief, or various forms of damage dealers all of which have had their own series) so it's the only one based around a big, burly, classically muscled guy, something which is not finally used to any really interesting purpose.  I bring it up because the protagonist becomes both the leader of the local adventurer's guild *and* the master of the local dungeon, who creates monsters (huge gorillas, dinosaurs) who are sentient enough to fight on the people's side when commanded to do and who the adventurers hunt for their hides and other parts.  So he is a kind of local magnate who runs an early-capitalism business: the adventurers sometimes get killed, the monsters are endlessly created and sacrificed, but presumably the little hell world of unending needless death and conflict is worth it for the economic benefits.

Since "The Strongest Tank" (etc) is a minor work this conflict is never resolved or even acknowledged.  How is Delicious in Dungeon addressing it?  After all, if Laios does become king it will involve control of the dungeon in some way: is he similarly going to have people hunting and dying in order to eat an endless stream of created sentient victims?

The first step in recognizing this as a conflict is by considering cooking itself.  Cooking is a creative act, and one that transforms Thanatos (killing all those monsters, risking death) into Eros (creating the source of life for oneself and others).  As I write about in Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds , a characteristic part of the isekai genre, and one that often applies to generic fantasy anime, is that they serve as hopeful fantasies based around Eros rather than Thanatos -- fantasies in which people have the power to create a better world -- and this includes "humble" arts such as cooking.

So Delicious in Dungeon is overtly interested in ecology and is in some fundamental sense about our ecological crisis.  There is embedded in it a horror-world that we uneasily fear may be coming into being -- "Soylent Green is people!" and the whole mythos of things getting so bad that we are gradually acclimated into cannibalism.  ("Do you have any better ideas?" Laios asks when proposing that they eat his sister.)  There is also the hope of something else: the creation of a new ecology in which we all have enough to eat because we have changed what we eat.  Giving up meat for climate purposes?  Instead we can eat insects, protein grown from bacteria, or whatever and they are really delicious if prepared in the right way.  The second story starts from Tolkien and his "reject technology to preserve bucolic England", but it can not really end there because we have passed the point where preservation could work: we need a new system.

Laios is a monstrous figure because he stands at the juncture of these two stories.  No one can understand him or why he is so focused on eating monsters.  The new system has not yet come into being and might never do so: he might end as a monster, or he might prefigure the time when we have eaten our monsters and something that can sustain us into the future can arise.

(end of the series)

The Time of Monsters (part 2)

(first part is here)

 Can you eat Ents?

The reason why a Lovecraftian reading of Delicious in Dungeon is incomplete is because the series is also very interested in ecology, something that Lovecraft had no feeling for.  Before I can try to describe how these interact I have to go back to: where do these characters come from?  What more or less stock setting are they drawing on?

For a lot of this I'm going to be relying on analysis of the isekai subgenre that I wrote up as Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: if you like reading this you may want to read that at some point.  Delicious in Dungeon is not an isekai (none of the characters are from other worlds) but there are similarities between isekai and generic fantasy anime.  In particular, isekai are almost universally done as a type of fantasy world that uses conventions from after the transition from tabletop RPGs to computer game RPGs.

Delicious in Dungeon notably leaves out the computer game RPG conventions entirely.  There are no status windows through which characters can see their stats, no hyper-focus on numerical ratings and lists of skills.  In addition, although there clearly is some influence from tabletop RPGs (the concept of "dungeoning", "parties", some of the monsters) the characters are not really operating within a tabletop RPG system.  No one has a "level" as far as I can remember.  No one really has a "character class": Laios the fighter can be taught how to use basic magic if anyone bothers to teach him.  The combat system fundamentally does not use hit points: there is a scene where a burly fighter has a water spirit shoot a sort of spear of water through her skull and she is instantly dead in a way that no hit point based system would really allow.  The combat is generally brutal and people are killed when a vital spot is hit.

 What the characters do have is Tolkien-similar races, filtered through Tolkien's influence on the tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons.  Thus Chilchuck is a "half-foot" because Tolkein's hobbits were renamed to halflings in D&D because of copyright concerns.  In short, they are a party whose composition is somewhat like that of the Fellowship of the Ring: Laios the human future king is Aragorn, Chilchuck the trap expert (note: not a "thief") is a mixture of the various hobbits, Marcille the mage elf combines Legolas and Gandalf, and Senshi is Gimli.  The core party in Delicious in Dungeon has various members that were part of the group earlier or who joined later, and I could push the analogy further, but this is far enough for my purposes.

Are they really similar to these Tolkien models?  They are sort of reverse caricatures or jokes about them, distancing devices:

* Laios is one of the least classifiable characters in recent anime: anime has many doofus character stock types (the doofus who is OK because they are incredibly powerful, the one who makes bad decisions but always lucks out, the one driven by incredible horniness, the one who is just comic relief) and he isn't any of them.  He's socially awkward but not to the extent of being classifiable as having what people currently think of as a disability.  Mostly he is someone who just does not fit in: his backstory has him doing a number of combat-related jobs all of which he left without some precipitating crisis and without particularly learning anything from them.

* Marcille might be the closest to a Tolkien original type because Tolkien's elves notably sometimes had their magical creations go bad.  But she's a lesbian and Tolkien is probably the least lesbian fantasy writer imaginable.  She could conceivably be bi or pan or something -- it's not like we know her exact preference -- but the anime makes it as clear as it can without her saying "Hi, I'm a lesbian" that she's attracted to Falin (the scene where they rescue Falin and suddenly Marcille is all flirty and "sleep next to me") and probably in love with her (the scene where Marcille starts crying, thinking about a difficult part of Falin's life.)   By the way, what is it about anime fans even in the current day that made me encounter "Do Laios and Marcille end up getting married?" as a recurring question when looking up basic facts about the series?  Of course they don't.

* Chilchuck is almost a reverse hobbit: a good person on the inside to his friends, but close-mouthed, secretive (his long-term party doesn't even know he's married), cynical, not notably interested in food, an adult who has children.  Tolkien hobbits would have thought it was the greatest thing ever to eat all these tasty monsters.  There have been other Tolkien-derived halfling characters who were members of thieves guilds and the like -- Regis from the R.A. Salvatore Drizzt books, for instance -- but they tend to maintain outward good nature as a kind of racial trait.

* Senshi is a driven, complex personality without being in any way concerned with any of the things that Tolkien dwarves are concerned about.  He doesn't care about his clan.  He doesn't care about treasure: there's an amusing scene where they are cooking and eating bugs that look like coins and he throws some gold coins that were mixed with them away because gold is useless.  He doesn't care about his axe and his prized implements are his cooking tools.

So the series has made it very clear that although this may look like Tolkien it is not.  Why go this far for the look and then spend so much effort playing against type?  I suspect that it has something to do with the Ring (as in the the temptation to use power that works out badly), the Ents, and the Scouring of the Shire, these last not standing for a real ecological consciousness but at least a preservationist one.  The world of Delicious in Dungeon is one where the ancient elves and dwarves had rather modern technology, steampunk level if not contemporary, and gave it up.

Because there are many overt references to ecology in the series.  Marcille is interested in dungeons and how to create them because she is interested in magical self-sustaining systems.  Senshi purposefully does not destroy golems on a particular dungeon floor because to do so would throw off the dungeon's ecological balance, and he sees himself as a maintainer of that balance.  The dungeon is kept in repair not merely by "magic" but by actual creatures that mimic the walls when they are damaged and secrete new shells to replace them.  (Laios, of course, tries to eat these creatures because he must eat everything.)

To make a long story short, I think that the series is fundamentally about our contemporary ecological crises, and these have to take off from Tolkien in this context because that's the last branch of the series Tolkien -> tabletop RPG -> computer RPG where they really appear.  More about that in the next part.

(the second part is here )

The Time of Monsters (part 1)

 "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born: now is the time of monsters."

 

This is an extended critical piece about the amine Delicious in Dungeon, sometimes called Dungeon Meshi by people who want to call it by something that is like its Japanese name (transliterated as "Danjon Meshi") .  The direct translation would be "Dungeon Meal".    I've based it on the first 24 episodes and have lazily not looked up anything about the writer, the artist(s), or the (completed) manga that it's based on.  There will be spoilers for these episodes and this piece assumes familiarity with them.

How, exactly, is Laios monstrous?  I suggest that he is because, as in the Gramsci quote above, he stands in an old world while a new one is uncertainly coming into being around him.  This leads him to greater and greater acts of cannibalism, culminating in a plan to save his sister from being bodily merged with a dragon by killing her, cutting off her "dragon parts" (the anime shows an envisioned neat and bloodless sectioning, like parts of a cow separated in an illustration at a butcher's shop) and calling in everyone he knows for a great feast where they eat all of the parts of his sister that they want to dispose of before resurrecting her.  Laios is (clearly, in my opinion) slated to become king, and this is going to be a central story for his kingdom.

 What kind of story is this? At first it seems something like the stories from Joseph Campbell's book _Primitive Mythology_ about ceremonial kings who had the best of everything the community could provide and then were ritually sacrificed and eaten to ensure the turning of the seasons and continued fertility.   But Campbell is increasingly out of favor and this usage of "primitive" as a stage that humanity went through is no longer held.  More to the point, this is not a story about natural cycles, but about an incredible *un*naturalness.  Here is the voice over at the end of the 24th episode: "Dungeon food. To eat or be eaten.  There is no hierarchy here.  Only the simple concept that eating is a privilege of the living."  But the series has already made it clear that this dungeon has the unusual property that people killed here do not really die: their souls stay attached to their bodies and they may be brought back to life at any time if part of their body still exists.  For the monsters' part, they are created by magic.  So the dungeon is a hell world where creatures live to eat the dead, then die and are eaten, then are returned to life again to kill and eat.  Un-nature red in tooth and claw.

Descent to the Dungeons of Madness

 It is possible to interpret the series as an often sought after contemporary mashup, the cheery, cutesy Lovecraftian horror story.  It would go something like this.  A party is forced to descend into a dungeon without supplies in order to save and resurrect one of their party members who has been eaten by a dragon.  The party leader, Laios, has always been fascinated by the idea of eating monsters, and even has a sort of cookbook for doing so, but it seems like he's never really tried it.  Luckily they meet a dwarf, Senshi, who is an expert cook specializing in the use of monster parts.  They descend the dungeon and are forced to subsist on Senshi's cooking: some party members are repulsed by the idea of eating monsters but they all agree that the meals are delicious.

As they go on and the initial resistance of the party members to eating monsters fades, there is a new controversy: some of the monsters are partially humanoid and eating pieces of them is uncomfortably like eating human parts.  Some party members object: it is agreed that there will be some restrictions on this kind of food but this partial agreement is subverted, especially when food gets short.  They find and kill the dragon that ate their missing party member, Laios' sister Falin, and eat meat from the dragon even though it ate and mostly digested Falin.  Falin is resurrected and then lost when she is partially transformed into the dragon that ate her.

Then there is an absolutely critical bit of back story for this interpretation.  Senshi, as a young dwarf, was part of a dwarven expedition to this dungeon that went wrong, and he was the sole survivor.  To save his life, the leader of the expedition gave him a mysterious bowl of bad tasting meat, which Senshi devoured to avoid starvation.  Senshi has since then always suspected that he was cannibalistically fed the meat of another dwarf, and it is implied that a major reason why he took up cooking monsters was to taste them and find out whether it was a monster he ate or another person.  This lifelong trauma underlies the series.

Then, at episode 24, there is a suggestion of how the rest of the series will go: the dungeon, presided over by "the mad mage", has slowly changed the party into monsters, although they are physically no different from how they once were.  Laios enthusiastically proposes that they can separate their missing party member from the dragon she has been partly transformed into by calling in everyone they know to a great feast where they will all eat his sister Falin.  This will dispose of her "monstrous parts", but of course the monstrosity will have gone into the feasters as they insensibly enjoy themselves, their jaws dripping with dragon/human blood.

Lovecraft wrote more than one short story about cannibalism, I believe, and not cannibalism as a "primitive rite" -- there is at least one where a New England settler gains everlasting life for at long as he can kill and eat other people.   This reading is part of the series, but only a part.  This particular anime rehearses certain kinds on contemporary social tension, and the Lovecraftian reading functions as one of its component levels.  In future parts of this series I hope to look at how this horror is the base of a larger horror of our time and the hope of its eventual resolution.

Next part is here.

My crank list of which novels should have won the Hugos

Why do the Hugos matter?  No one really knows.  Literary awards are usually judged by a group of experienced critics, academics, and/or writers who put some work into reading widely and trying to evaluate literary quality.  The Hugos are chosen by notably provincial SF fans who are typically from the US and who paid $50 for the privilege of voting.  Yet the Hugos are still referred to as science fiction's highest award and recommended to people as if they represent books that people may want to read.

My concern with the Hugos is as a list of recommendations for readers.  Every now and then someone decides that it would be interesting to read the major books in SF and they naturally think that maybe they should start with the Hugo list and read one from each year.  They shouldn't.  

I'm going to go through the list of Hugo novel winners and pick out which novel should have won in each year.  What makes me a good critic, or at least a better than the combined opinion of Hugo voters?  Not much, but frankly it does not take much.  I've read somewhat widely in SF and fantasy and I'm at least aware of what literary fiction is in a way that Hugo voters do not seem to be (I will get to the much discussed case of Gravity's Rainbow around 1973.)  There are going to be holes in my recommendations because I am still from the US and have not yet gotten around to reading Italo Calvino or the Strugatsky brothers.  For the purpose of this initial list I'm not even going to look at the winners of SF's juried awards and crib off of them: I may do that at some later time.

Since the Hugos are supposed to be about popularity, I'm going to consider popularity to at least some extent. As explained below, this is for the time being a list that only chooses winners for the 20th century.

Eligibility

I am going to consider which novel should have won, whether or not it was nominated for that year.  For the purpose of doing this, I had to figure out the Hugo award's eligibility rules.  To summarize:

* each Hugo award is for works first published in the year before that, sometimes for a longer period

* works published that are not in English are eligible in their first year of English translation

* serialized works can only win once, either for one element of the series or the whole series with its last installment

* one of the specific ways in which eligibility can be extended is that works are eligible up to their first year of US publication if they were first published outside the US. 

* there are rules that only science fiction cares about concerning the differences in length between novels, novellas, and novelettes that I may or may not follow.

 Lastly, there is one mind-boggling element listed in the Hugo award rules: the Hugo awards are apparently not for SF after all.  A breezy subheader called "Science Fiction? Fantasy? Horror?" says that works of fantasy or horror are also eligible.  I had originally looked at the list of Hugo winners and decided that they must have changed the rules to make fantasy eligible in 2000 (there are very few fantasy works nominated before this).  It seems clear to me, given that the change around 2000 was so notable, that the Hugos are awards for a marketing category -- in other words, the books placed in the science fiction section of a US bookstore that are now a mixture of SF and fantasy with fantasy predominating.  As such I'm going to choose which works should have won the Hugos as if fantasy was always eligible: horror gets a different couple of shelves in the bookstore so I will leave that out.

The 1950s 

Amusingly the Hugos started in the 1950s and therefore left out SF's "Golden Age" (1938-1946) entirely.  Don't worry, you are not really missing much.

1953: The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester , eligibility 1952-1953

my pick: same

 

After all I've written about the Hugos, they arguably got it right for the first ever one.  The Demolished Man is probably better than Bester's other major work and since it concerns a mentally ill oligarch who has to be taken down it is still relevant.  People will have heard of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury a lot more but it is not actually a better work. 

1955: They'd Rather Be Right (aka The Forever Machine), Mark Clifton & Frank Riley, eligibility 1954-1955

my pick: The Lord of the Rings trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien

The whole trilogy was first published 1954-1955.  Not many people may have heard of this obscure work, but it's better than whatever the Hugo process picked out.

1956: Double Star, Robert A. Heinlein, eligibility 1954-1956 but I will only consider 1956

my pick: Till We Have Faces, C.S. Lewis

 

Alternatively, The Last Battle by C.S. Lewis was published 1956 so I could have chosen the entire Narnia series but the work above is for adults and is better.

1958: The Big Time, Fritz Leiber, eligibility 1957-1958

my pick: The Languages of Pao, Jack Vance

I've read The Big Time and it is an absolutely horrible work that should be forgotten.  That is not to say that Fritz Leiber is a bad writer: he is going to be long remembered for the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories but not for this.  The Hugos don't seem to have picked much Vance even when he wrote SF, inexplicably.

 

1959: A Case of Conscience, James Blish, eligibility 1958

 my pick: The Zimiamvian trilogy, E.R. Eddison

People may start complaining that my list is too fantasy dominated but what can I do -- The Mezentian Gate published in 1958 is the last element of the Zimiamvian trilogy, which is far better than anything Blish ever wrote.  That includes A Case of Conscience, which is incidentally one of the most morally and ethically objectionable genocide justifying books that SF has ever produced which is saying a lot.

 

This was the first Hugo with runner-up nominations.

 ,

1960: Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein , eligibility 1959

my pick: Titus Alone, Mervyn Peake or The Sirens of Titan, Kurt Vonnegut

Neither of these are fantasy works: Titus Alone has an actual surveillance drone in it and if Arthur C. Clarke invented satellites then Peake probably invented drones.  But of course the Gormenghast series, which Titus Alone is the last of, is better as writing than anything that Heinlein ever wrote.  The Sirens of Titan was nominated for a Hugo this year and I should acknowledge that this time they at least nominated something that plausibly should have won.

Hugo score for the 1950s: 1 out of 6

The 1960s 

The 1960s were the time of religious and ecological SF in the US, and were also when 3 of the best SF writers produced many of their major works -- Philip K. Dick. Ursula K. LeGuin, and Stanislaw Lem.  Going by the Hugo criterion of first publication in English, Lem's works do not show up in the 1960s although they should: I will try to drop them into later decades.  This decade's works were dominated by SF instead of fantasy as with the 1950s, and involved the first actually difficult decisions that I encountered.   All Hugos for this decade had the previous year as their eligibility period.

1961: A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr. 

my pick: Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys 

 

Rogue Moon was one of the nominees: it's not a great book but it's better than the Hugo winner.  I also considered A Fine and Private Place by Peter S. Beagle.

 

1962: Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein 

my pick: same

 

This was amazingly popular and gives a feel for the religious SF of the time: I think that it's amusing that it's likely to be the only Heinlein that makes my list because in terms of general writing quality it is not very good.

 

1963: The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick 

my pick: same

 

The Hugos are really going strong here: two in a row!

 

1964: Way Station, Clifford D. Simak

my pick: Cat's Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. 

 

Cat's Cradle was nominated, so the Hugos are still doing pretty well.

 

1965: The Wanderer, Fritz Leiber 

my pick: Martian Time-Slip, Philip K. Dick  

I don't know why people kept voting in minor works by Leiber.  Martian Time-Slip is a foundational work about the abandonment of people who are disabled, depressed, or old.

1966: tie between This Immortal, Roger Zelazny and Dune, Frank Herbert

my pick: Dune, Frank Herbert

 

The Hugos came so close but had to make this a tie.  This Immortal by Roger Zelazny is fine: I've read almost everything Zelazny has written and it's not his best but it's OK.  Dune was both popular and influential as one of the first major SF works to actually consider that alternate societies and ecosystems to "generic US or medieval Europe" might exist.  If there was going to be a tie, it should have been with The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by PKD.

1967: The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, Robert A. Heinlein 

my pick: the totally incongruous combination of Giles Goat-Boy, John Barth, or The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov

 

The 1966 publication year was an extremely difficult one to choose from.  The Hugos nominated Babel-17 by Samuel Delany which was certainly in the running, but Giles Goat-Boy was one of the first popular metafictional / postmodern novels.  The Master and Margarita is in no real sense "a novel of the sixties" and was written between 1928-1940, but this was the year of its first English publication so in it goes.

1968: Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

my pick: same

 

I might argue here but I wrote that I'd go along with the Hugos when they were close enough.

 

1969: Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner 

my pick: Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch or A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin

 

Brunner wrote some good books but this one should not have won for this year.   The year also had Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by PKD which also would have been better.

1970: The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin 

my pick: same

 

The year had PKD's Ubik, which usually would have won but not against this competition.

 

Hugo score for the 1960s: 4.5 out of 10.  I'm guessing this will be the best decade ever for the award. 

The 1970s

The 1970s were the decade in which people questioned the whole direction of SF as a genre, mostly particularly with a push to integrate SF into literary fiction.  The experimentalist fiction of the New Wave was the closest thing SF has had to an avant-garde.  People also started to point out how homophobic classical SF was and push a more feminist SF (one classic marker being The Female Man, Joanna Russ, 1975).  In general, this was a direction not followed in later decades, with the movie Star Wars (1977) signaling a change in SF from written to visual media and a corresponding reversion back to a more pulp style.

1971: Ringworld, Larry Niven 

my pick: Solaris, Stanislaw Lem (first English translation 1970)

The conparison between these two is particularly harsh because they are both supposedly hard SF writers.  It's just that one is "hard" by convention (how does the Ringworld material stand up under stress? Should the writer handwave something no don't bother, um, it's very hard) and one is the best hard SF writer ever, who wrote a whole oeuvre about the limits of science and how science actually works.

1972: To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip José Farmer 

my pick: The Lathe of Heaven, Ursula K. Le Guin 

This was at least nominated for a Hugo.

1973: The Gods Themselves, Isaac Asimov

my pick: The Iron Dream, Norman Spinrad 

Which should you choose, someone who you want to reward for work they did in the Golden Age, or someone who wrote a work that essentially destroys the Golden Age?  I'm not going to forget The Iron Dream and I can barely recall what differentiates The Gods Themselves from similar works.

 

1974: Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke 

my pick: Gravity's Rainbow, Thomas Pynchon

 

Before I get to Gravity's Rainbow,  I'll mention that two Stanislaw Lem books, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub and The Invincible, were both first translated into English in 1973.  While Clarke was writing a classic Big Dumb Object book Lem was in print with SF's first use of nanomachines (in The Invincible).  Both Lem books were better than anything written within the genre that year.

 

But what about outside the genre?  There was a moment in 1973 when Gravity's Rainbow was nominated for a Nebula Award when it seemed like literary fiction and SF might be converging, in which SF would no longer be a ghettoized genre and be evaluated in literary terms.  That did not happen.  For a longer treatment of this theme, read Jonathan Lethem about it-- this is from a 1998 Village Voice article, but he's written the same in many other places.

In between Gravity's Rainbow and the end of the 20th century, each famous US literary author wrote approximately one SF novel.  In terms of technical writing skill, these were of course better than what SF writers could do: in terms of understanding SF ideas and the history of the genre, they were abysmal.  I'm going to ignore most of them.

 

1975: The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin 

my pick: same

 

As an anarchist I'm supposed to especially like this anarchist novel: I do not -- it is one of the most deprived and disappointing anarchies envisioned.  But it's a good book.  Quite possibly this should have been the year for Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino (first year of English translation) but I haven't read it.

1976: The Forever War, Joe Haldeman

 my pick: Dhalgren, Samuel Delany 

I really like The Forever War and I would like to just agree with this Hugo, but I can't.  Bonus pick: if you want something as end-of-the-Vietnam-War as The Forever War, but quite possibly a bit better, there is also The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson also published 1975.

 

1977: Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang, Kate Wilhelm 

my pick: The Cornelius Quartet, Michael Moorcock 

I considered and rejected Ratner's Star by Dom DeLillo: the Cornelius quartet (the first four Jerry Cornelius novels, now generally bound into a single volume) are a pure distillation of what the English New Wave was.

1978: Gateway, Frederik Pohl

my pick: A Scanner Darkly, Philip K. Dick 

 

Gateway is a fairly good book, but A Scanner Darkly captured an era.

1979: Dreamsnake, Vonda N. McIntyre 

my pick: same

 

I thought of The Chain of Chance but this list is already overpopulated with time-shifted Lem books.  

1980: The Fountains of Paradise, Arthur C. Clarke

my pick: On Wings of Song, Thomas M. Disch

 

This was at least nominated for a Hugo.  Runner-up: Engine Summer by John Crowley.

 

 Hugo score for the 1970s: 2 out of 10. 

 

The 1980s 

The 1980s were a fragmented decade for SF -- they were certainly the decade of the emergence of cyberpunk, but the list of authors who have written cyberpunk that will last is a bit thin: it's William Gibson for a book that essentially created the subgenre for the public, and Bruce Sterling.   The end of the decade saw the first SF books by Iain M. Banks, part of what I consider to be a renaissance of politically left writing from UK authors.

 

1981: The Snow Queen, Joan D. Vinge 

my pick: Return From the Stara, Stanislaw Lem (first English translation) 

This should be the last time-shifted Lem book.

1982: Downbelow Station, C. J. Cherryh

my pick: Little, Big by John Crowley 

Little, Big was at least nominated for a Hugo.  In almost any other year, Lanark by Alasdair Gray would have been my pick.

 

1983: Foundation's Edge, Isaac Asimov

my pick: The Sword of the Lictor, Gene Wolfe (standing in some way for the entire Book of the New Sun)

 

The last Gene Wolfe book in the series was published in the next year, but this was the year in one of them was nominated for a Hugo so I will stick with this one.

 

1984: Startide Rising, David Brin 

my pick: the Dying Earth series, Jack Vance 

My pick would have been The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe but it is not really a standalone book and the third book in the series was nominated for a Hugo in the last year.  Therefore I chose Cugel's Saga, published 1983, as the end (in terms of novels) of Jack Vance's Dying Earth series.

This year is as good as any to mark the start of a trend of popular fantasy series that are more of less open ended and that end when their writers can no longer write.  In particular, this year has the first Terry Pratchett Discworld book, The Colour of Magic, and the first Steven Brust Dragaeran book, Jherag.  I would expect these to win some kind of series award at some point, but not for any of the individual novels in the series.

1985: Neuromancer, William Gibson

my pick: same

 

1986: Ender's Game, Orson Scott Card 

my pick: Schismatrix, Bruce Sterling 

It's understandable that SF fans would like a book in which adults watch a child kick another child to death so that the child can be prepared to naturally accept genocide as a way to win, but Ender's Game is not actually a good book in any sense.  Schismatrix is better read as a later book, Schismatrix Plus which adds a number of short stories, but since this is a list of awards for novels I decided on the earlier version.

I would have liked to fit something by Brian Aldiss in here, such as Helliconia Winter standing for the whole Helliconia series or Hothouse in the previous year, but those are the tail end of the New Wave and this is the time of cyberpunk.

1987: Speaker for the Dead, Orson Scott Card

my pick: The Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood 

Margaret Atwood notably does not consider her works to be SF, but in a category that spans SF and fantasy they should be in there somewhere.

1988: The Uplift War, David Brin

my pick: Consider Phlebas, Iain M.. Banks

 

The first of Iain Banks' Culture books.  Not his best, but better than anything else at the time.  This is usually classed as a space opera: I think it's better classified as a form of anarchist SF.

This year also has Soldiers of Paradise, the first book by Paul Park.  Some book by Paul Park should be on this list somewhere but popularity is part of even a fake Hugo list and I don't think that his books ever got the attention that they deserved.

1989: Cyteen, C. J. Cherryh

my pick: Islands in the Net, Bruce Sterling 

 

This was at least nominated for a Hugo.

 

1990: Hyperion, Dan Simmons 

my pick: The Player of Games, Iain M. Banks

 

Probably Banks' second best book.

 

Hugo score for the 1980s: 1 out of 10.  

The 1990s

 The 1990s were a decade of decline for written SF.  A larger and larger number of novels were published: fewer and fewer had any particular kind of literary quality.  For some previous decades it was a challenge to pick the best work in a year: for this one it's a challenge to pick anything.

Lois McMaster Bujold is a perennial favorite for this decade of Hugos.  I've read and enjoyed all of her books: as with any everlasting series, they don't seem individually better than the others or rising to the quality of something I could recommend as a single work. 

 

1991: The Vor Game, Lois McMaster Bujold 

my pick: Use of Weapons, Iain M. Banks

 

Probably Banks' best book and certainly should have won this year.

 

1992: Barrayar, Lois McMaster Bujold

my pick: The Difference Engine, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling 

 

The definitive steampunk - as - cyberpunk book.  

 

1993:  Doomsday Book, Connie Willis, and A Fire Upon the Deep, Vernor Vinge

my pick: same

 

I am not enthused by either of these but I can't find anything better.  I might have chosen Red Mars but another book in its series won the Hugo next year.   I really should have chosen The Course of the Heart by M. John Harrison but it wasn't published in the US until 2004 and for a US dominated award like the Hugos should probably win in a later year.

1994: Green Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson

my pick: same

 

Red Mars was a better book, but I will defer to the Hugos since it's close enough.

1995: Mirror Dance, Lois McMaster Bujold 

my pick: A History Maker, Alasdair Gray

 

This one would have been Four Ways to Forgiveness by Ursula K. Le Guin but it is classed as a collection of short stories.   There is a trend through the rest of this decade (and to some extent for the rest of SF's existence so far) of ignoring work from the UK because it is not as well known in the US or not even published in the US.

 

1996: The Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson 

my pick: Fairyland, Paul McAuley 

 

1997: Blue Mars, Kim Stanley Robinson 

my pick: Holy Fire, Bruce Sterling 

This was nominated for a Hugo and is one of Sterling's best books.

 

1998: Forever Peace, Joe Haldeman

my pick: nothing

 

I looked diligently over the list of books published in 1997 and couldn't find anything that seemed worth putting on this list.  I guess I'll count this as agreement with the Hugos but really this could have been a year for no award.

 

1999: To Say Nothing of the Dog, Connie Willis 

my pick: anything else

 

I will try not to write too much about the book that won, written as it was in a sentimental style that infiltrated the plot to the extent of characters saving a cat at the risk of destroying the historical timeline.  There are a good number of books better than this one published this year: they include A Parable of the Talents, Octavia Butler, The Book of Knights, Yves Mayanrd, and A Clash of Kings, George R.R. Martin.  I will count this as disagreement with the Hugos since it should have preferably gone to any of those.

2000: A Deepness in the Sky, Vernor Vinge

my pick: A Civil Campaign, Lois McMaster Bujold 

 

It seems like a joke that I would choose a book by Bujold after disagreeing with the Hugos so many times about them before, but there is a particular reason why this one should win: there is a trend in popular fantasy / SF that begins around this time in mashing up genres or reworking famous characters, and this book is a successful SF version of a Regency romance.

Hugo score for the 1990s: 3 out of 10.  

The 2000s Through Now

I don't think that I can trust my own judgement to make a list of winners from this point forward.  I was discouraged by the state of SF in the late 1990s and stopped reading as much of it.  There were certainly authors that I continued to read, and I could assign a number of years to China Mieville or Adam Roberts.  But I really haven't read enough of the field to be as confident of who should have won in each year.  For instance, I still haven't read any N.K. Jemison.  Here is a list of works that I think should have been at least nominated, by year of publication instead of eligibility year:

2001: Perdido Street Station, China Mieville

2002: Altered Carbon, Richard K. Morgan

2003: Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood

2004: Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, Susanna Clarke and The Scar, China Mieville

2007: Land of the Headless, Adam Roberts

2009: Anathem, Neil Stephanson

2010: New Model Army, Adam Roberts, the city & the city, China Mieville

2011: By Light Alone, Adam Roberts, Kraken, China Mieville, The Half-Made World, Felix Gilman

2012: Embassytown, China Mieville

2013: The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks

2014: The Islanders, Christopher Priest

2016: Europe in Winter, Dave Hutchinson 

2017: The Thing Itself, Adam Roberts

2018: Above the Snowline, Steph Swainston

2022: The This, Adam Roberts

I may add to this at some later time if I read more.

Total Score for the 20th Century Hugo novel awards

Rounding up, this gives the Hugos a total score of 12 good picks out of 46 awards, or 26%. If you had gone back to the Hugo list of novels that won in the 20th century, you would have had a 1/4 chance of getting the best one for each year.

 

55 good SF / fantasy books

These are all of the science fiction and fantasy books out of the thousands that I've read that I 5 starred on Library Thing. As such the list is not intended as a comprehensive list of the best, and it certainly could be more diverse in various ways, but it is what it is -- SF/F books that I thought at some time in my life (possibly when I was 13) were among the best. They are in alphabetic order by last name of the author.

• Iain M. Banks: The Player of Games, Use of Weapons
• John Bellairs: The Face in the Frost
• James Branch Cabell: The Silver Stallion, Figures of Earth, The High Place
• G. K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday
• John Crowley: Little, Big , Engine Summer
• Avram Davidson: The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy
• Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time Slip, Deus Irae (with Roger Zelazny), Ubik, The Penultimate Truth, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Galactic Pot-Healer
• Lord Dunsany: At the Edge of the World, The King of Elfland's Daughter, The Complete Pegana
• William Gibson: The Difference Engine (with Bruce Sterling), Neuromancer
• Alasdair Gray: Lanark
• M. John Harrison: The Course of the Heart
• Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
• Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness, A Wizard of Earthsea
• Stanislaw Lem: Solaris, Return From the Stars, The Futurological Congress, Memoirs Found In a Bathtub, The Cyberaid
• H.P. Lovecraft: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
• China Mieville: The Scar, Iron Council
• Michael Moorcock: The Cornelius Chronicles Vol 1. (collects The Final Programme through The Condition of Muzak)
• Ward Moore: Greener Than You Think
• Jenna Katerin Moran: An Unclean Legacy
• George Orwell: 1984
• Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan, Gormenghast
• Christopher Priest: The Islanders
• Adam Roberts: New Model Army, The This
• Michael Shea: Nifft the Lean
• Norman Spinrad: The Iron Dream
• Olaf Stapledon: Last and First Men, Star Maker
• Bruce Sterling: Schismatrix Plus, Holy Fire, Islands in the Net
• Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
• Steph Swainston: Above the Snowline
• H.G. Wells: The Invisible Man
• Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light

Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 5

V. Other conclusions

Isekai has had a minor Satanic Panic in Russia in 2021 due to a belief that the genre depicts reincarnation as desirable and therefore may tempt people to hasten it. Judicial clowning aside, a more serious backlash has occurred throughout the last decade. It probably peaked in 2016-217 when a Shōsetsuka ni Narō short story contest banned isekai entries and the publisher Kadokowa followed suit in its own contest the next year. (1) As far as I can tell, there was a feeling that the genre was overpopulated and might have exhausted itself. Whatever the merits of this, the genre remained popular and the bans did not continue. (2)

So why has isekai, at least so far, kept coming back? It is not merely because it is an escapist genre about literally escaping to another world. The virtues of escapism are part of an ancient dispute within fantasy, with Tolkein supposedly saying to C.S. Lewis that the people most hostile to the idea of escape are jailers, and Michael Moorcock retorting much later that "Jailers love escapism. What they hate is escape." Whichever side of this you prefer, the point in the present context is that there are many genres that provide escapism if that is what people want. Why isekai?

I suggest that part of the answer is isekai's wholehearted commitment to Eros. There are other escapist genres that are commited to Thanatos – science fiction, for instance, likes to call itself the literature of ideas but might more accurately be called the literature of genocide – but death drive abounds in our societies as we embrace ecological and other catastrophes, and perhaps that is what needs to be escaped from most of all.

Another possible answer is provided by Baudrillard, writing in 1983 just 4 years after Eco's _The Role of the Reader_. In these four years something uneasy has happened to that word "infantilism":

"The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he also responds with a double strategy. To the demand to be an object, he opposes all the practices of disobedience, revolt, emancipation; in short, a total claim to subjecthood. To the demand to be a subject, he opposes just as stubbornly and efficaciously with an object's resistance, that is to say, in exactly the opposite manner: infantilism, hyperconformism, a total dependence, passivity, idiocy. Neither of the two strategies has more objective value than the other. The resistance-as-subject is today unilaterally valorized and held as positive - just as in the political sphere only the practices of liberation, emancipation, expression, and constitution as a political subject are taken to be valuable and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal or perhaps even superior impact, of all the practices-as-object - the renunciation of the position of subject and of meaning - exactly the practices of the masses - which we bury and forget under the contemptuous terms of alienation and passivity."

[...] "the system's current argument is the maximization of the word and the maximal production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of a refusal of meaning and a refusal of the word - or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non-reception."

Closed genres, with their multitude of slight variations around what the reader already expects, are a way of producing content without also producing meaning, and are therefore ideal for this strategy. I find this somewhat persuasive since the charge of infantilism never made any sense for what is essentially an adolescent pursuit.

In any case, Baudrillard's concept of the mass leads back to the religious beliefs in reincarnation and demiurgy – in this context, practices of the mass rather than the individual genius. The individually talented writer, like Tolkien, may well feel that they are practicing subcreation, a sort of divinely approved inpiration, and we refer to the judgment of the works of these writers as being up to history, as if they have gone to Heaven.

Reincarnation, on the other hand, is a practice that everyone does, taking roles in turn, with no single act or single life being definitive. Demiurgy in its classic Gnostic context was the individual act of a Demiurge, but in a more ordinary sense is the effort of any creator to make a fictional world that they know will be seriously flawed. As such it can be done by anyone, and is done, as the more than a million novels submitted to Shōsetsuka ni Narō show. It is the task of our time to find a way to value this work as itself, without taking the trouble – in any case impossible – of reading all of it. (3)

Endnotes

1. The Kadokowa ban was supposedly in favor of adult content, since teenage protagonists were also banned. The publisher specified that it had to be a male, adult protagonist, so it may have been a matter of them going for a very specific demographic.

2. American reception of isekai is largely based on anime, for which a common perception is that isekai displaces more varied works (anime is a medium that has works in many different genres) and replaces longer series with a succession of 12-episode ones that often only have a single season. Since isekai is not as closely identified with anime in Japan, I don't know whether this is as much of a cause for backlash there.

3. I have thought about a universally produced art for a much longer time in the context of poetry: in the US, the audience for live poetry events comes perilously close to a 1:1 ratio of writers to readers.

Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 4

IV. Open publishing

How are isekai works produced? My first experience with them was as anime (as I imagine is most common in America) and I vaguely imagined a staff of professionals, dissatisfied by having to work on them instead of some auteur project, set to writing, drawing, and directing them full time much as American TV is produced.

The truth is much stranger. A large majority of isekai (other than a few precursors) started out as amateur web series or "web novels" published on the Japanese site Shōsetsuka ni Narō ("Let's Become A Novelist"). (Of the well-known series I spot checked, one, _Sword Art Online_, started as a web series published on the writer's own site.) Shōsetsuka ni Narō started in 2004 and lets users post written works, read them for free, and upvote them if they like them. By the late 2000s, isekai became so popular on the site that they were called Narō novels: the term isekai itself was coined around 2012.

As a result, isekai is a genre of fanfic without a canonical fictional universe (at least, without one that is copyrighted). One of the early popular isekai on Shōsetsuka ni Narō was _The Familiar of Zero_, and it became popular to write other isekai on the site that were fanfic of that work. However, the new genre quickly took as its setting the generalized world of computer RPGs, a setting which can not be copyrighted. In every respect the writers and writing style are fanfic. Fanfic was once defined as being commercially unpublishable because of copyright: now it fuels an entire popular genre.

Studios and publishers go through the site and pick out the highest voted works, then buy rights to them and start them out in some other branch of mass media. Isekai usually starts as web novels, then become light novels (serial written text with occasional illustrations), then become manga and/or anime, gain other spinoffs like a gag manga, and then with even higher popularity may become a movie, live action film, or computer game. The result is that a publisher risks nothing in the way of initial advances or ongoing payments to keep professional writers writing, the writers are pleased to be published (many seem to write as a sideline to their "real job"), and the work produced is perfectly suited to its audience because that audience is generally the same as the people voting on the site. (1)

This seems to me to be the future of how these kinds of works are produced. One can see something similar with the popular (non-isekai) South Korean Webtoon platform, whose most popular series have started to be published as anime and live action TV series in their own right. It only takes one more historical accident or technology transfer to get science fiction, for example, writing thousands of vaguely Star Trek or Star Wars like (but not copywritable) fanfics on some site and that becoming a main source of English-language SF. In this respect isekai had a boost because its setting, the computer RPG, was familiar to an entire generation yet generic and closed.

This is not to say that a backlash has not already occured. In the last part of this series I'll get into the reception of isekai and try to tie some of these threads together.

next part of the series

Endnotes

1) I have no idea whether the voting on the site is fair. There may be the usual problems with using a botnet to mass upvote, payola, having insider connections etc. My sense is that the methods for getting works to medium popularity may be unfair but that the number of legitimate voting users is high enough so that it would be difficult to cheat from there to the top.

2) Images: Shōsetsuka ni Narō site logo, chibi versions of popular isekai characters, a scene from the popular early Webtoon _Noblesse_.

Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 3

III. closed Eco system

Umberto Eco was one of the primary 20th century literary critics writing about open vs closed works. His 1962 book _The Open Work_ described open works as having a large number of possible meanings, using ambiguity and sometimes a degree of formal input by a performer or reader (in terms of rearranging of adding to the text) to allow the reader to create meaning that was not necessarily intended by the author. (In order to keep this lowbrow, I've shown as an example below an early TTRPG module that had blank spaces for some encounters that the DM was supposed to fill in.) Closed works, by design or function, restrict interpretation as much as possible. (1)

This analysis becomes much more complicated by 1979's book _The Role of the Reader_, after Eco took up semiotics. Here it is taken for granted that some degree of reader interpretation is needed to create meaning for any text. The author foresees a model of the possible reader (which Eco calls the Model Reader), and can in some ways guide the creation of this Model Reader via the text, if only by making them look things up or by discouraging other types of readers from reading it. Readers, on the other hand, create as a kind of hypothesis guided by the text a Model Author, and so decide how to read the text. (2)

As examples of closed works, Eco turns to Superman comics and Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. "They apparently aim at pulling the reader along a predetermined path, carefully displaying their effects so as to arouse pity or fear, excitement or depression at the due place and at the right moment. [...] They seem to be structured according to an inflexible project. Unfortunately, the only one not to have been 'inflexibly' planned is the reader." (Introduction, pg 8). (3) So the next question: why do people read these texts? Why not just always read more open texts and enjoy the readerly creation of meaning via interpretation? (Adam Roberts asks the same kind of thing in his piece on the Wheel of Time books.) Eco offers one of the best if rather obvious answers to this that I've read.

Eco starts his chapter / essay "The Myth of Superman" in The Role of the Reader by giving a very good description of the disintegration of temporality in these comics, done so that Superman can not really accumulate a past that changes him as an archetypal character. Then he goes through "the repertoire of topoi, of recurrent stock situations" that animate popular mystery series. Then: "The attraction of the book, the sense of repose, of psychological extension which it is capable of conferring, lies in the fact that, plopped in an easy chair or in the seat of a train compartment, the reader continually recovers, point by point, what he already knows, what he wants to know again: that is why he has purchased the book." Later: "Is it not also natural that the cultured person who in moments of intellectual tension seeks a stimulus in an action painting or in a piece of serial music should in moments of relaxation and escape (healthy and indispensable) tend towards triumphant infantile laziness and turn to the consumer product for pacification in an orgy of redundance?" We should "show more indulgence towards escape entertainments [...] reproving ourselves for having exercised an acid moralism on what is innocuous and perhaps even beneficial" as long as this does not "[become] the norm of every imaginative activity."

Eco takes pains with "plopped in an easy chair", "infantile", etc. and his general stance of indulgence to signal that he is a respectable intellectual after all. Reading more of his essays, it becomes apparent that he really likes comics, mysteries, all of these closed forms. His extremely popular first book, _The Name of the Rose_, features a medieval monk who functions as a detective a la Sherlock Holmes, and let's check off the list of libidinal forms listed in the last part of this series for isekai and apply them to Sherlock Holmes. Overt sexuality is unsuitable for the period in which it was written, but power as super-competence, leavened by outsider status and therefore not presenting him as a policeman / bully? Yes. Popularity? Holmes becomes well known to the public over the course of the series, and his close friendship with Dr. Watson is legendary. Creativity? The violin, the experiments in scientific methods of detection. Eco wrote his book with expert worldbuilding, using what he had learned as a scholar of medieval writing, but at its core the same operations occur as in any other closed work of this type. Superhero comics more or less add the overt sexuality back to the other tropes.

In later essays, as I dimly remember, Eco was less defensive about closed works. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the particular essay that I remember reading. I remember that he credited someone else with the idea of the "tired mind", the mind that having exhausted itself with intellectual work now needed to read a genre of closed texts where each presented some kind of variation around a core set of expectations, and which therefore could not truly surprise the reader or offer a wholly new experience that would only further deplete the reader's mental energy. This, I believe, is what underlies most SF and fantasy, mysteries, superhero comics, and a host of other popular forms.

Why would Japan have developed such a pure genre of the tired-mind type when the genre is, after all, intended for adolescents? Various cultural factors are at play, but I think it's significant that Japanese middle-to-high school students are famously under stress at school, called on for a peak educational performance that may determine their social-economic possibilities for the rest of their lives. Of course they are, after school, tired minds.

next part of the series

Endnotes

1. Eco uses examples from all sorts of media – text, films, music, paintings – but I became interested in _The Open Work_ when I started writing poetry. The degree of ambiguity is critical to the success of a 20th century poem since it must have enough meaning to connect with the reader's own experience yet not so much that one might as well be writing prose. The core problem I've seen in new writers of poetry is that they have emotional connections to the phrases they've used that make them think that readers will have the same connections, but their writing isn't sufficient to suggest a similar response in someone else.

2. Sometime after 1979 it became commonplace to say that communities of readers create their own communal methods of interpretation. I wouldn't ascribe these kinds of preferred-interpretation-guidance powers to a single author in the vast majority of cases.

3. Eco here offers the kind of reversal that academics do when they return to a topic more than a decade later, after adopting a new disciplinary approach: closed works are now open to any interpretation because they assume only one kind of reader, open works are so complex that they guide all readers who engage with them to a single interpretation. Either this is a too-clever ridiculousness or I've misunderstood it or probably both. In any case what I'd call the Model Publisher of closed works really does not care whether someone reads Superman comics with a different interpretation decades later: their immediate sales are based on whether they are reaching their target readers.

Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 2

II. A libidinal genre

Isekai appears as an experiment in how to pack as much libidinal drive as possible into works that also require at least a bare minimum of plot and characterization. Formally, the genre is defined around a character or characters being transported to and living in another world: isekai translates as "different world" or "otherworld". But a core part of any isekai work is Freudian eros – sexuality, power, popularity, creativity. The main characters of isekai therefore sometimes resemble Mary Sues / Gary Stus, but without an authorial self-insertion element: instead the reader or viewer is encouraged to identify with the character.

In terms of medium, isekai can be a novel, a manga, an anime, a video game, or other specialized variants such as light novels. This multi-media nature is a core part of how isekai transforms from fanfic into mass entertainment, a process that I'll describe later on. Isekai are almost always serial in form.

What are the core moves of isekai, in a libidinal sense?

* Sexuality: the main character must attract the attention of sexually attractive people who want to sleep with them, often for no immediately apparent reason. In the majority of isekai, these are women or girls attracted to a man or boy, but they can be of any gender, as can the main character. Because isekai is in theory made for adolescents, this continual sexual appeal often occurs without any actual sex going on – one of the most unbelievable aspects of the genre, given that the main characters are most often older teenagers.

* Power: the main character has some potentially world-changing ability and becomes one of the important people in their new world. This can be magical combat strength, contemporary knowledge or technology in a pseudo-medieval setting, unusual capacity for development, fated heroism, super-competence at some activity that is not magical or technological per se, or a wide range of other devices. Crucially, the character almost always starts out as weak in perception or reality, because an always super-powerful character would be perceived as a bully and not invite reader / viewer identification. (1) This weakness is referred to throughout the isekai but is quickly subverted, often right at the beginning of the series.

* Popularity: everyone comes to admire the character, or if they hate the character this is an initial weakness as above. They are not merely individually powerful but are seen to be powerful in society and within forms understandable by that society. Similarly, even if they were previously an isolated, alienated individual they quickly make fast friends and enjoy close companionship.

* Creativity: killing is part of most isekai, but it is rarely the main expression of enjoyment of power for the main character. The main focus is usually creative: figuring out how to improve a society, discovering magic and researching spells, starting businesses, setting up trade, constructing buildings, cooking.

Within these requirements there are multitude of formal variations. The transition of a character to another world is either done through direct transfer of some kind (commonly, the character is somehow transported into the world of an RPG video game through a malfunction in the game's virtual reality system) or through reincarnation. Any case one can think of within these limits has been attempted: reverse isekai where fantasy characters are transported to our world, the main character as putative villain in the new setting, the main character as super-skilled before reincarnation instead of ordinary, the reincarnation fulfilling some unmet goal in the character's past life or as a manipulation for some sinister purpose. There are often comic elements, including those that play off of the tropes of the genre.

But within this formal variation there is a strange consistency of setting. Most often, the other world is a pseudo-medieval fantasy world that is immediately recognizable as the generic form of a Dungeons & Dragons descended RPG, complete with attack magic, monsters, character classes, and levels. The themes of reincarnation and demiurgy (2) are quite visible: reincarnation is the most common way of transferring a character to another world in isekai, while the most common method used in older stories or other genres (the Urashima Tarō Japanese folk tale, Narnia, some Lovecraft stories) is a door between worlds. Demiurgy is present in that the gods involved in this reincarnation or the creation of the other world almost never have a sense of the numinous: they are played for laughs, for erotic appeal, are fairy-tale guardian spirits, or are relatively friendly antagonists.

This initial recognition of the influence of RPGs is followed by a sense (for someone whose main experience is with TTRPGs) that something is off, that something else has intervened. What has intervened is the role-playing video game form.

Character abilities are not just numericized, they are viewable (via a "status scan" or similar) to the character or others within a world, as they are within most computer games of this type, and as they are not within almost all TTRPGs. Almost all isekai with this setting have an "adventurer's guild" that the characters join which provides posted jobs that the characters can do and offers measured ranks. This is not a common element of TTRPGs, but early video game RPGs had a building like this as a typical form of design because it was a convenient hub for players to progress through the game with some element of choice about which part they did next.

Why would isekai have descended from computer game RPGs instead of TTRPGs directly? I don't know enough to answer this question: I imagine that it has something to do with how by the time RPGs reached mass popularity in Japan they had mostly migrated to computer form. But they evidently have, and the difference is important because it is a difference between an open and a closed form. (I mean these mostly in a sense derived from Umberto Eco, which I'll get into later.) In a TTRPG, in theory you can do anything, because the entity creating the game world is a person. In a computer game one, you can't: your options are limited by the programming of the game. Even in an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online RPG) like World of Warcraft with 20+ million players, players can talk to each other and even act as communities, but their options are fundamentally set and can not be quickly changed.

A multitude of minor variations within a formally closed and libidinal system: this is the basic design of many popular genres that isekai takes to a limit. In the next part I'll write briefly about Umberto Eco, open vs closed works, and why people enjoy closed works.

next part of the series

Endnotes

1) The process of giving a character with amazing abilities or drive a weakness so they don't appear to be a superhuman might be called "Vorkosiganation" after a character of Lois McMaster Bujold's. That popular SF series neatly pairs its main character's birth to wealth and power with his birth defects that make people regard him as a despised mutant: each book pairs his successful efforts with another serious medical injury.

2) Of course reincarnation is a belief of Buddhist and Shinto religion, and what I refer to as demiurgy might be better expressed through the Shinto idea of kami: spirits that do not have omnipresence, omniscience, or omnipotence. These ideas are not necessarily transmitted to this genre along with the overt RPG baggage: they are part of Japanese culture. There is also a classical line of descent of the idea that is European: for instance in Plato's Republic Book X, Chapter III there is the question of what kind of life you would best choose if reincarnated and the story of how Odysseus wisely chooses to be reborn as a common person. But the element of conscious choice and the retention of knowledge from a previous life also occur in Tibetan Buddhism.

3) Images above: a statue of Eros from Freud's collection, a scene from the isekai _My Life As a Villainess_, an unknown scene that I downloaded and promptly lost the reference to, a scene from the isekai _Restaurant To Another World_, a scene depicting a typical RPG Adventurer's Guild complete with job posting board.

Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 1

(a meditation on RPGs, isekai, fanfic, and some ideas of Umberto Eco)

I. Introduction: religious rites

If you are an older person, as I am – or perhaps a younger person in a particular subculture – you may have played what is now called a Table-Top Role Playing Game or TTRPG. At once the terminology betrays that this is already an old phrase. These games used to simply be known as RPGs before home computers made widespread computer gaming possible and they had to be distinguished from role-playing video games. The core and representative example of this kind of game is Dungeons & Dragons, but there are now some people who have played this as a computer game and have never played a tabletop version at all. At any rate, if you've never played one, they are basically what the kids play in _Stranger Things_.

Really, anyone bothering to read this probably knows what a TTRPG is, or at least can glance at the wiki page. But it's important to distinguish them from other forms of RPGs for reasons that I'll get into later in the series: table-top RPGs are formally open, while computerized forms are more or less closed.

A few years after I started to play what were later called TTRPGs, I realized that these games involve an ersatz form of religious practice. This has nothing to do with the religion(s) *in* the game, which usually involve an invented pantheon that is nevertheless flavored by popular ideas about medieval Christianity. Nor do they have anything to do with the recurring moral panics in the US about the game encouraging Satanism or belief in magic. They have to do with reincarnation and demiurgy.

First, reincarnation. Play a TTRPG for a while, and eventually your character will die, usually from mischance. What you do then is grieve, and then you roll up a new character – you use the game's creation method to start again with a different persona. Or perhaps the Game Master does not run the kind of game where player characters commonly die, or you don't play a single campaign for that long. In that case whenever you start a new campaign or try a new system, there the character creation step is again. It becomes apparent that this is a kind of play-practice for a form of reincarnation: you yourself perform the part of a soul that sequentially animates a number of imagined bodies. This doesn't mean that TTRPG players end up believing in reincarnation, but it is a form of repeated practice, connected with emotion, that reinforces it as a vague folk idea.

Next, demiurgy. The Game Master or Dungeon Master in one of these games creates the world, both its original form and as a description of what you sense and what happens in response to everything that you do. This person clearly occupies the place of God for the invented world – not one of the gods within the world-setting, who you can sometimes fight and defeat, but the real creator and animator of everything. At the same time, you are aware that this is an ordinary person, one of your acquaintances or friends, who may be called on to DM for the group because they are somewhat better at it than the rest of you but is not superhuman. Therefore, they are a demiurge, the artisan-creator of a world who is not the real, ultimate creator. Gnosticism, the religious tendency most associated with the idea of a demiurge, usually views the demiurge as either ignorant or misguided: to quote wiki "his act of creation occurs in an unconscious semblance of the divine model, and thus is fundamentally flawed, or else is formed with the malevolent intention of entrapping aspects of the divine in materiality."

These two religious ideas are transmitted in latent form through every descendent of the table-top RPG, including the descendent genre known as isekai. In this process they travel from a small-scale communal medium to a mass media product that notably starts out as fanfic, a form of fanfic that is publishable because it has escaped copyrighted characters in favor of an uncopyrighted setting. Isekai reveals something about how a set of creative problems in mass culture have been solved, beginning with the RPG in the mid-1970s.

next part of the series

End notes:

1) I've written some scattered text about the general case of demiurgy as it applies to fiction, especially science fiction or fantasy where the writer creates the world as well as the characters that inhabit it. Most of this was written more than 20 years ago and hardly seems worth recovering. In general, the creation of a fictional world is referred to in one of three ways depending on whether it's given positive, neutral, or negative valence: subcreation, worldbuilding, or demiurgy. (Subcreation is Tolkien's word, which makes it very well studied: worldbuilding is what people teach when you take an SF writing course.)

2) I was unsure where to start with this set of ideas but decided that RPGs made the best starting point. It is not chronologically the earliest form out of the set (RPGs, isekai, fanfic): isekai might be considered to have started earlier if you include texts like C.S. Lewis' _Narnia_ books or Michael Moorcock's _Eternal Champion_ (I don't: I think the genre as such is Japanese) and fanfic has been in existence for as long as published fiction and notably took on its contemporary meaning with _Star Trek_ fanfic in the late 1960s.

3) The illustration I've chosen for the demiurge is a character actually named Demiurge from the popular isekai _Overlord_: it's probably fan art but I got it from google image search and I'm not sure how to credit it. Crediting fan work is one of the important problems that the makers of isekai managed to address.