I’m intrigued, if not entirely convinced, by some of the arguments Erik Kain explores here about whether fantasy is an inherently Christian genre. He quotes D.G. Meyers on C.S. Lewis, who writes that:

Lewis said in a 1947 essay that “To construct plausible and moving ‘other worlds’ you must draw upon the only real ‘other world’ we know, that of the spirit.” No statement about the genre has ever been more definitive. The bedrock premise of fantasy, which cannot be waived without voiding the genre, is the existence of a spirit realm. Lewis’s Narnia, Tolkien’s Middle Earth, Rowling’s “wizarding world,” parallel universes of all kind are imaginative reconstructions of Christianity’s first principle: namely, that the “kingdom of heaven” is the only true world.

I’m not sure I agree with the premise that fantasy depends on the idea of another world. Certainly there’s some fantasy that depends on escaping entirely to a parallel universe, whether it’s accessible at the back of a wardrobe or through a competitive, Ivy League-style entrance exams process. But another world is hardly a Christian concept: Islam has highly developed and debated visions of limbo, judgment, hell, and heaven.

And there’s also fantasy based on the idea that we simply don’t know everything about the world that we live in, that there is power that we can access here and now if we know where to look for it and are determined enough to exercise it, all of which give us plenty of hooks in Jewish and Islamic tradition. In the former, take the legend of the golem, the idea that by very hard work and access to esoteric knowledge, rabbis were able to summon protectors for the Jewish people from the earth. There’s also a strong tradition of Jewish mysticism and Messianism, which suggests a permeable boundary between realms and regimes. Judaism has a demonic tradition that includes creatures like Dubbyks and Mazikeen, just as Islam has Jinns, Ifrits, and angels. Christians aren’t the only ones to have fairy realms or ghosts. And in Judaism, the Reconstructionist drive toward human transcendence and elimination of oppression is a framework for an epic quest that can take place in the here and now.

I think the point is more that, as a modification of how Erik puts it, that the fantasy that we see on the American market is “not founded in Christian themes so much as it is rooted in distinctly Anglo-Saxon mythology. And not just the mythology of the Medieval, feudalistic period, but the pre-Christian myths of the faerie-folk as well.” That we see certain things on the market doesn’t mean that fantasy is limited to those things, or inherently grows out to those things. It just means that we’re reliant on old patterns. I don’t think Neil Gaiman’s American Gods is perfect, but it is a rich illustration of the possibilities of Egyptian gods of death, of pre-Christian totem spirits, of Ifrits on the streets of New York for fantasy even if it doesn’t fulfill all of that promise itself.

The post contains spoilers for Neil Gaiman’s American Gods. Voting for the next book club will begin on Monday.

I don’t think it comes as a surprise to anyone who’s read along with this book club so far that I don’t think this is a terribly successful novel. Gaiman tells far more frequently than he shows, doesn’t do nearly as much as he could with an utterly fascinating concept, and relies heavily on a twist ending that, while obvious, still leaches some of the pleasure from the journey and absolves him of actually having to resolve the conflict that he’s set up, because surprise, it doesn’t matter! That said, I think some of the best things in the novel happen in these final sections.

First, is the idea we’ve been waiting for all along: gods don’t survive well in America because America is itself a deity, and the rise of fall of gods in America is itself a sacrifice to the land that Whiskey Jack explains to Shadow after his vigil for Mr. Wednesday and his trip through the underworld, which as trips through the underworld go is a real snoozefest. That stuff should wrench, man. As Jack puts it:

I’m a culture hero. We do the same shit gods do we just screw up more and nobody worships us. They tell stories about us, but they tell the ones that make us look bad along with the ones where we came out fairly okay…This is not a good country for gods. My people figured that out early on. There are creator spirits who found the arth or made it or shit it out, but you think about it: who’s going to worship Coyote? He made love to Porcupine Woman and got his dick shot through with more needles than a pincushion. He’d argue with rocks and the rocks would win. So yeah, my people figured that maybe there’s something at the back of it all, a creator, a great spirit, and so we say thank you to it, because it’s always good to say thank you. But we never built churches. We didn’t need to. The land was the church. The land was the religion. The land was older and wiser than the people who walked on it.

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io9 reports that Marvel has picked Doctor Strange as the next superhero slated for a movie franchise—or at least a movie. If they’re going to do that, Marvel should just make an adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s 1602, the eight-issue story he wrote in 2003 that transplanted the Marvel pantheon back to Queen Elizabeth’s court.

It wouldn’t be as farfetched as it sounds. 1602 is an independent continuity, sure, and it’s an elaborate period piece. But the two best superhero movies of the summer were reasonably elaborate period pieces. And because Doctor Strange’s powers are openly acknowledged to be magical and mystic, instead of merely a kind of science so sophisticated and futuristic that it seems like magic, in a way he’s a much better fit for a world where magic vied equally with science for predominance. I’ve always been sort of entertained by the idea that Doctor Strange ended up in Greenwich Village in the 1970s—San Francisco or Portland might have been a better option, but I do appreciate the effort to find a magician a place where he might plausibly feel at home in the twentieth century.

And it’s not just that Stephen Strange fits better in an earlier century. 1602 is a nice little experiment in exactly how many circumstances superhero concepts can be resonant in. For the X-Men, the struggle between Professor Xavier and Magneto is as applicable to the inquisition as it is to black liberation or gay rights; men like Nick Fury will find hire in any generation; it’s got one of the most distinct and thoughtful Thor stories on record; and the power of the American idea doesn’t acquire its magic with the Shot Heard Round the World. That last point is particularly important: I’m not sure Gaiman has a distinct American idea in America Gods, but he manages to conjure up something akin to an originary American blessing and tragedy in 1602, a sense of chosenness for the land. And now that we’ve met all of these characters, or at least, most of them, you could just tell the story without worrying about spending a lot of time on origins. It would even redeem the Fantastic Four, and force folks to start over given that Chris Evans is Captain America now.

It’ll never happen, of course. It’s too weird. It doesn’t lend itself to an ongoing storyline because it has a central, resolvable mystery. It would be confusing for audiences who don’t follow comic books and aren’t used to juggling between multiple continuities at once. But Marvel has these people signed for nine-movie contracts. If it’s going to wring every last drop of potential profit out of them, it’d be fun if towards the end, they did something weird and brilliant, and more intensely engaged with the American idea as a whole than most of the stories it’s putting on-screen now.

NPR probably doesn’t get enough credit for it, but I’ve always been impressed by the way the organization rebranded itself. Making NPR one of the central destinations for legitimate streaming of new albums and early, comprehensive interviews on new music has been a terrific way to position the organization on the leading edge of cultural consumption — it’s both servicey and makes NPR content more likely to get read. So I’m not surprised, but I am glad, to see that NPR’s ahead of its competitors in another important area: giving due praise to science fiction and fantasy.

This summer, NPR’s trying to identify the 100 best science fiction and fantasy novels out there. I think there’s a debate to be had about combining the genres, but I’m not going to throw down and have it here, especially since they’re establishing at least some guidelines by excluding paranormal romance and YA, with the promise that they’ll devote next summer to the latter. Instead, I’d say get over there and get in comments. This is a nice chance at high — or at least medium — culture acknowledgement of a genre that’s fighting hard for its legitimacy. I want this list to end up as strong as possible so everyone has to recognize. Off the top of my head, though I reserve the right to revise this later, I’d probably say Red Mars, Ender’s Game, The Mists of Avalon, Season of Mists (I am a sucker for anything Miltonian), and Cryptonomicon, if that counts.

For folks fretting about whether HBO’s actually going to roll with a full seven seasons of Game of Thrones, I think you can probably relax. Over the weekend, The Hollywood Reporter broke the news that the network apparently has signed up Tom Hanks’ Playtone to do six seasons of its planned adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s novel American Gods, each at 10 to 12 episodes. Obviously, things could fall apart, and I’m not sure what the very sizable order will mean for how the story changes from page to screen: will they be lingering in the narrative? Throwing Anansi Boys in the mix, too? But the fact that the initial plan is for six seasons suggests huge hopes and huge ambitions — as well as sizable cojones — at HBO. And given that American Gods is a single novel, if the network’s willing to blow it out to 60-plus episodes of television, I imagine they’re ready to go the distance with the existing material of Game of Thrones.

I’m utterly fascinated by HBO’s decision that fantasy is the place for them to take a stand. I love it, of course. Even more than conquering the box office, the premium cable channel to end all premium cable channel’s decision to embrace genre fiction is a major mark of validation. But it also strikes me as a risky one. HBO has always relied on good reviews, on Emmys, on the sense that it’s doing something profoundly different and better than other networks, to get audiences to pony up the subscription fees that let them turn out highly unusual programming. The high priesthood of criticism hasn’t uniformly accepted fantasy as a serious genre, whether it’s Ginia Bellafante’s headache-inducing dismissal of Game of Thrones as a dudely fantasy, or the fact that (though the magazine did do a feature on the long-awaited A Dance With Dragons) the New Yorker has yet to review the show. By contrast, Nancy Franklin got to John From Cincinnati just two weeks after the show premiered in 2007. True Blood‘s always intentionally been treated as if it’s been froth, which is probably due in part to its origins in Charlaine Harris’s paranormal romances as well as in its embrace of its status as high-concept, good-looking, violent candy.

The Wire and The Sopranos were easy shows for critics to embrace, if only because they were morally challenging variations on familiar forms: the Dickensian social novel and the tragic American family novel. Championing them was a way to show your sophistication, as well as the quality of your education. That’s not to say that Game of Thrones hasn’t been reviewed, and reviewed very, very well, just that it hasn’t conquered everyone’s hearts yet, and I think part of that has to do with its genre. And certainly fandom has a critic-proof power.

Neil Gaiman has much more mainstream cred than George R. R. Martin does; to a certain extent, he has transcended the label of fantasy. And it may be that if American Gods succeeds, it’ll end up casting a backwards glow on Game of Thrones. But HBO has long relied on critical acclaim to attract audiences to shows they might otherwise find baffling or unattractive. It’ll be interesting to see what the long-term impact of the network’s investment is on where fantasy fits in the pantheon.