Tags: narratives

I read recently read two books that had writers as their main protagonists:

• Death Of The Author by Nnedi Okorafor, and
• Yellowface by Rebecca F Kuang.

They were both perfectly fine. But I found it hard to get really involved in either narrative. The stakes just never felt that high.

Not that high stakes a pre-requisite for a gripping narrative. I enjoyed the films The Social Network and Like A Complete Unknown. Those stakes couldn’t be lower. One is about a website that might’ve ripped off its idea from another website. The other is about someone who’d like to play different kinds of music but other people would rather he played the same music. It’s a credit to the writers and directors of both films that they could create compelling stories from such objectively unimportant subjects.

Getting back to those two books, maybe there’s something navel-gazey when writers write about writing. Then again, I really like non-fiction books about writing from Ann Lamott, Stephen King, and more.

Perhaps it’s not the writing part, but the milieu of publishing.

I’m trying to think if there are any great films about film-making (Inception doesn’t count). Living In Oblivion is pretty great. But a lot of its appeal is that it’s not taking itself too seriously.

All too often when a story is set in its own medium (a book about publishing; a film about film-making) it runs the risk of over-estimating its own importance.

The most eye-rolling example of this is The Morning Show, a television show about a television show. It genuinely tries to make the case for the super-important work being done by vacuous morning chat shows.

I read Madeline Miller’s Circe last year. I loved it. It was my favourite fiction book I read that year.

Reading Circe kicked off a bit of a reading spree for me. I sought out other retellings of Greek myths. There’s no shortage of good books out there from Pat Barker, Natalie Haynes, Jennifer Saint, Claire Heywood, Claire North, and more.

The obvious difference between these retellings and the older accounts by Homer, Ovid and the lads is to re-centre the women in these stories. There’s a rich seam of narratives to be mined between the lines of the Greek myths.

But what’s fascinating to me is to see how these modern interpretations differ from one another. Sometimes I’ll finish one book, then pick up another that tells the same story from a very different angle.

The biggest difference I’ve noticed is the presence or absence of supernatural intervention. Some of these writers tell their stories with gods and goddesses front and centre. Others tell the very same stories as realistic accounts without any magic.

Take Perseus. Please.

The excellent Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes tells the story of Medusa. There’s magic a-plenty. In fact, Perseus himself is little more than a clueless bumbler who wouldn’t last a minute without divine interventation.

The Shadow Of Perseus by Claire Heywood also tells Medusa’s story. But this time there’s no magic whatsoever. The narrative is driven not by gods and goddesses, but by the force of toxic masculinity.

Pat Barker tells the story of the Trojan war in her Women Of Troy series. She keeps it grounded and gritty. When Natalie Haynes tells the same story in A Thousand Ships, the people in it are little more than playthings of the gods.

Then there are the books with just a light touch of the supernatural. While Madeline Miller’s Circe was necessarily imbued with magic, her first novel The Song Of Achilles keeps it mostly under wraps. The supernatural is there, but it doesn’t propel the narrative.

Claire North has a trilogy of books called the Songs of Penelope, retelling the Odyssey from Penelope’s perspective (like Margaret Atwood did in The Penelopiad). On the face of it, these seem to fall on the supernatural side; each book is narrated by a different deity. But the gods are strangely powerless. Everyone believes in them, but they themselves behave in a non-interventionist way. As though they didn’t exist at all.

It makes me wonder what it would be like to have other shared myths retold with or without magic.

How would the Marvel universe look if it were grounded in reality? Can you retell Harry Potter as the goings-on at a cult school for the delusional? What would Star Wars be like without the Force? (although I guess Andor already answers that one)

Anyway, if you’re interested in reading some modern takes on Greek myths, here’s a list of books for you:

• Madeline Miller
  1. The Song Of Achilles
  2. Circe
• Natalie Haynes
  1. A Thousand Ships
  2. Stone Blind
• Pat Barker
  1. The Silence Of The Girls
  2. The Women Of Troy
  3. The Voyage Home
• Claire North
  1. Ithica
  2. House Of Odysseus
  3. The Last Song Of Penelope
• Jennifer Saint
  1. Ariadne
  2. Elektra
  3. Atalanta
• Claire Heywood
  1. The Shadow Of Perseus
  2. Daughters Of Sparta
• Costanza Casati
  1. Clytemnestra
• Margaret Atwood
  1. The Penelopiad

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The next best thing to having Kurt Vonnegut at the blackboard.

Thinking in Triplicate – Mule Design Studio – Medium

Erika has written a great guest post on Ev’s blog. It covers the meaning, the impact, and the responsibility of design …and how we’ve been chasing the wrong measurements of success.

We design for the experience of a single user at a time and expect that the collective experience, and the collective impact, will take care of itself.

Untold AI: The Untold | Sci-fi interfaces

Prompted by his time at Clearleft’s AI gathering in Juvet, Chris has been delving deep into the stories we tell about artificial intelligence …and what stories are missing.

And here we are at the eponymous answer to the question that I first asked at Juvet around 7 months ago: What stories aren’t we telling ourselves about AI?