James,
In The Lies That Bind Us you write about differences in fiction, naming 4 different ways one can write, the first being purely for entertainment, the 4th being prompting illumination.
My question is, what are some of the best fiction writers/novels for categories 3 (factual) and 4 (illuminating)?
Is it the same list as the one you recently gave for prophetic writers? London, Burroughs, Lamb, Howard, Anderson, etc.?
You'd be included I believe.
Barry Bliss
PS This goes for songs as well. I know that my songs are good, but they do not entertain.
Barry, I am honored that you might include me on such lists.
I do not recall the chapter in The Lies That Bind Us, but do recall the inspiration, which will head the illumination list.
Fiction as Illumination
From memory, from most important writers in shaping this writer’s world view of humanity within reality:
-1. J.R.R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings, is number one for the heroic figure within the collective will of striving polities. Something dark and false pulls upon all of the power actors.
-2. Gene Wolfe, The Book of the New Sun [4 novels] and Litany of the Long Sun [4 novels], are the most deeply faceted novels dealing with the blind hero groping within the irelit [1] focus of manipulative and oppressive society.
-3. Robert E. Howard’s raw works, mostly short, focused on the undomesticated [barbarian] hero striving within an evil sphere of domestication, sorrowful supplication and crooked manipulation. The best are: by This Ax!, People of the Black Circle, The Tower of the Elephant, Beyond the Black River, The Vale of Lost Women, The Devil in Iron, and Rogues in the House.
-4. Howard’s more refined works: The Phoenix on the Sword, The Scarlet Citadel, The Hour of the Dragon, The Worms of The Earth, Almuric, all of the Solomon Kane prose & verse, Black Canaan, The Daughter of Erlik Khan, Lord of Samarkand, shed light on the heroic plight of the natural hero who has been captured by a decadent civilization and must overcome the veneer of corruption applied to his soul.
-5. C.S. Lewis’ Prelanda, That Hideous Strength and Out of the Hidden Planet, are astute, and not that entertaining, observations upon man’s plight.
-6. The Mucker by Edgar Rice Borroughs is a very entertaining romantically applied condition of the modern masculine orphan.
-7. Stephan Pressfield’s, Gates of Fire, Tides of War, Alexander and The Afghan Campaign are deeply instructive as to the psychology of the warrior of the muscle powered age. He crosses the line between information and illumination constantly.
-8. Homer, in The Iliad and The Odyssey, is the best meditation on the spiritual plight of heroic souls acting within the anti heroic field of social hierarchy and conspiracy.
-9. Hesiod, in Theogony, Works and Days and The Shield of Herakles offer the reader a glimpse into the shadows of inequity and the shallows of evil that we all, knowingly or not, ply our lives within.
-10. The Book of Job, earliest written book of the Bible, instructs through stilted dialogue the paths more pleasingly sketched by Homer and Hesiod. While the heroes and unfortunates of the Greek poets are souls with concerns superseding the mortal sphere, Job and the men of his world, even the most pious among them, are rendered in starkly materialistic relief and harbor feelings more akin to our postmodern age than to the heathen’s of odeic [2] antiquity who saw eternity more clearly and tragically so.
Above are the examples of illumination that have most easily come to my mind, as I sit at this great desk, on a storybook Mountain above Coal Canyon Colorado, my ears ringing like rampant spheres as the puss drains from head to lungs in one of many bids to recall this soul to what I suppose is one of the darker corners of eternity.
Informative Novels?
This is a thinner list. I have generally read nonfiction for information and fiction for illumination. Note that the authors below who dominate the exposition of the material sphere are Brits of the Industrial Advent.
-0. Daniel Defoe in Moll Flanders and A Journal of the Plague Year has left us a precise social condition preserved in voice and act.
-1. Robert Lewis Stevenson, in all of his works, short and full, has left us an excellent body of work sketching the life of folk of various social levels in and before his time.
-2. Edgar Allen Poe, in his weird fiction, preserved much of the American spiritual condition.
-3. Charles Dickens, in Oliver Twist and many another stories, sketches the lives of common people as crushed under a soul eating and body wrecking system with un equaled candor.
-4. Louis L. Amour, in his historical novels and westerns presents much basic, social information in a quick and nuanced format. His novels The Walking Drum, Fair Blows the Wind, To the Far Blue Mountains and Sitka, present social situations from the 1200s, 1500s, 1600s and 1800s in a manner compatible with the mindset of the “Greatest Generation” who were the laborers that constructed our particular prison of plenty.
-5. Ben Bova, in his series on projected settlements of Mars and other planets, attempts to project challenges amazing to us, but possibly mundane to those who supersede us.
Here I feel the drag of reading fiction for mere details of method, material and spheres of social control. I could have continued the illumination series, easily, and yet struggle here. It is my ambition, in most of my 80 plus novels and the 20 in outline, to combine information and illumination in an entertaining story—this is my life’s ambition and I hope to meet with success. Interestingly, to the extent that I have enough fiction readers to generate judgments for or against these formats that come to my very limited attention, the main complaints are that the illumination is not colored with enough rosy-dawned hope. Guilty as charged, hope does yet linger in a declining writer’s soul.
Thanks for reading over these more than a dozen weird years.
Notes
-1. Ire lit, conjoined to irelit, is a new word introduced by this pulp writer. Meaning within the focus of an evil force.
—2. Apologies to the Greek language as well.
