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lotesseI read MacDonald's memoir-about-T.H. White "H Is For Hawk," and heard that she'd co-authored an SF novel with a thank-you to the fanfic writers of the AO3. So I had to read that.
This book interested me as science fiction, but really interested me as the work of fanfic writers gone pro. There's no sense of serial numbers filed off, although I suspect someone of something like Avengers or Stargate fandom, somewhere back in there. But, around a third of the way in, it starting hitting hard in the feels the way that fic can, and in a way I recognized at gut level.
It was interesting to try to understand why, what it was I was responding to. The best way I can put it is that it feels like Blache and MacDonald built a MilSF action/adventure canon as if it were pre-existing, and then applied fic techniques to the canon to maximize emotional intensity and investment.
We meet our protagonists, wry Brit-Indian psychic Rao and stoic solider with a heart of gold Adam, after they've already met. They shared an intense adventure together previously in Afghanistan; this adventure is often referenced, but never fully recapitulated in the text. That's not what it's there for; it's not part of the novel "Prophet." But there needs to be a canon with a backstory, so that they can reconnect and go deeper. That's the part this book is about.
In the first third of the book, current and past looks at Adam and Rao are interspersed with cuts to a little boy. The book centers on experimentation with a substance connected to nostalgia, and the power of the emotional need to re-connect with or fix the past. When the text reveals, through the medium of this mystery substance, that the little boy was Adam, in his own undisclosed past, it hits like a freight train.
You can imagine, then, the fanfic that those scenes with the little boy would have been. And you experience it, in hindsight, like fanfiction. It's like having already read fic for a canon as it continues. Would I have cared so much about Adam and Rao, with other framing? Maybe, I don't know. But all of the tools for creating emotional intensity, character depth, and growth through character intimacy that we learn in fandom are on display in this book, and it cranked me round like crazy.
The totemic nostalgia iconography gets increasingly zany, frequent, and funny as the book comes to a climax. There's a distressing bit with a fellow and a dog that's a bit FMA, and a zombie American Girl doll on the lam. The book's political arguments about nostalgia are pointed, with accurate and humanistic aim. The final setpieces might be more deeply enjoyed by a reader with a deeper grounding in 80s kids' commercial culture.
But really, this book left me with a surprising insight into how mastery of fanfic as an art can be used in the creation of original fiction. I always lament serial-number-filing, a bit, and the loss of intertextuality. Blache and MacDonald really do show the portability of many of the approaches to storytelling that ficwriters specialize in, and how effective those approaches can be in origfic.
This book interested me as science fiction, but really interested me as the work of fanfic writers gone pro. There's no sense of serial numbers filed off, although I suspect someone of something like Avengers or Stargate fandom, somewhere back in there. But, around a third of the way in, it starting hitting hard in the feels the way that fic can, and in a way I recognized at gut level.
It was interesting to try to understand why, what it was I was responding to. The best way I can put it is that it feels like Blache and MacDonald built a MilSF action/adventure canon as if it were pre-existing, and then applied fic techniques to the canon to maximize emotional intensity and investment.
We meet our protagonists, wry Brit-Indian psychic Rao and stoic solider with a heart of gold Adam, after they've already met. They shared an intense adventure together previously in Afghanistan; this adventure is often referenced, but never fully recapitulated in the text. That's not what it's there for; it's not part of the novel "Prophet." But there needs to be a canon with a backstory, so that they can reconnect and go deeper. That's the part this book is about.
In the first third of the book, current and past looks at Adam and Rao are interspersed with cuts to a little boy. The book centers on experimentation with a substance connected to nostalgia, and the power of the emotional need to re-connect with or fix the past. When the text reveals, through the medium of this mystery substance, that the little boy was Adam, in his own undisclosed past, it hits like a freight train.
You can imagine, then, the fanfic that those scenes with the little boy would have been. And you experience it, in hindsight, like fanfiction. It's like having already read fic for a canon as it continues. Would I have cared so much about Adam and Rao, with other framing? Maybe, I don't know. But all of the tools for creating emotional intensity, character depth, and growth through character intimacy that we learn in fandom are on display in this book, and it cranked me round like crazy.
The totemic nostalgia iconography gets increasingly zany, frequent, and funny as the book comes to a climax. There's a distressing bit with a fellow and a dog that's a bit FMA, and a zombie American Girl doll on the lam. The book's political arguments about nostalgia are pointed, with accurate and humanistic aim. The final setpieces might be more deeply enjoyed by a reader with a deeper grounding in 80s kids' commercial culture.
But really, this book left me with a surprising insight into how mastery of fanfic as an art can be used in the creation of original fiction. I always lament serial-number-filing, a bit, and the loss of intertextuality. Blache and MacDonald really do show the portability of many of the approaches to storytelling that ficwriters specialize in, and how effective those approaches can be in origfic.