Jo Walton’s new book What Makes This Book So Great (U.S. / U.K.), is a collection of some of her best Tor.com posts honoring, analyzing, and reassessing science fiction and fantasy. The full collection, featuring over 130 essays, is out on January 21st and includes great opinion pieces like this, originally published in December of 2008.
A little while ago the Mighty God King posted a marvellous collection of doctored book covers, with the titles he felt the books he’d loved as a teenager should have had. The genius of this was the way he used the exact right fonts every time, so that Mercedes Lackey’s My Little Pony Goes to War had just the font you were expecting to see on that cover. One of them that made me laugh out loud was his cover for George R. R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. (I love those books.) His new title was Knights Who Say “Fuck,” which amused me not only because of the clever Python reference but also because it’s true, they do, and that’s one of the things that makes it different from traditional high fantasy. He’s not the only person whose knights are saying “fuck” these days—Sarah Monette’s charmingly foul-mouthed Mildmay leaps to mind—but it is something you never used to see. It didn’t fit the register of fantasy. The register has broadened. Interesting.
I’m reading Cherryh’s Downbelow Station, which was published in 1981. I started it immediately after finishing Hellburner, which is set earlier but was published in 1992. I noticed immediately that in Downbelow Station the troopers “breathe an obscenity into com,” “swore quietly,” “swore at length,” “adding an obscenity.” In Hellburner in equivalent situations they’re saying “Shit, shit, shit!” and “Fuck!”
Now I read both of these books pretty much when they came out, and I didn’t notice anything odd about the level of permitted swearing in them. Yet something definitely changed between 1981 and 1992, and it wasn’t C. J. Cherryh. The number of times someone breathes an oath, an obscenity, or swears viciously in Downbelow Station, you can tell she knows the words the troopers are saying. In fact it reminds me of the coy dashes you get in Trollope, where the fact that a husband called a wife a “——” in He Knew He Was Right is plot-rocking, and no, you never find out what the word is. (The footnotes think “harlot.” As I’m not even faintly shocked by “harlot” I’ve decided to fill in that blank, and all Trollope’s blanks, with the worst words I know.)
So, was Cherryh being effectively censored by what you were allowed to say?
The thing that surprises me about that is the date. I thought it was the sixties when people in books were allowed to use actual oaths, rather than just mighty ones. Did genre fiction lag behind? Certainly it was the New Wave that started talking about sex, but how careful were the words? I noticed when reading W. E. B. Griffin that you can say “shit” all you like in his books as long as you’re not talking about “human excrement” and similarly “fuck” is fine unless you’re talking about “sexual intercourse.” Obscenities are different from description, and use of the words can vary in either direction. These words are charged, and they have very specific registers, they’re significant markers.
You used to see fake “futuristic” swearing. (Who can forget Larry Niven’s “tanj”?) When did that stop? Drinking Sapphire Wine has it, and that’s 1976.
So, things clearly changed in the eighties. Why? Was there a specific change, a specific book or date that it changed, within genre fiction? Or was it a general cultural change of what was acceptable slowly bleeding through into genre? Did it get to SF first and seep into fantasy later? A Game of Thrones is 1996.
And when did it stop being daring for people to swear “like a trooper” and become normal? My memory is that in South Wales when I was a child adults swore in Welsh, and what they said, translated, meant “God” or “the Devil,” and “bloody” was pretty strong swearing in English. But my memory of being a young adult in Britain in the early and mid-eighties didn’t include other young women casually saying “fuck” the way they do now. I think there has been an actual change, and it isn’t just that literature was coy about recording what people said, as that what people say has changed. I’m sure this is also a difference between Britain and North America, and maybe between different areas too.
And in the future? Well, there are fashions in these things. Perhaps our texts with their liberal scatterings of “fuck” will eventually look as quaint as Trollope’s dashes.
Jo Walton won the John W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer in 2002, and the World Fantasy Award for her novel Tooth and Claw in 2004. Her several other novels include the acclaimed “Small Change” alternate-history trilogy, comprising Farthing, Ha’penny, and Half a Crown. Her novel Among Others won the Hugo and Nebula Awards in 2012.
To me, when the book was published is not even the question about whether or not to use certain language. Was it used during the time the book is set?
For example, how OLD are the words Shit and Fuck?
Playing Assassin’s Creed:Black Flag (which takes place in the 1700s), it uses the word Fuck at different times. Was that word even used in the 1700s? Or does anyone really care whether or not that was the case? Is it used to just make the book, game, movie, more MODERN in some way?
Just wondering.
@Jo
There is still “fake” swearing – Battle Star Galactica for example replaces “Fuck” with “Frak” to escape US TV sensibilities and a lot of fantasy authors use in-world curses which may be world building or “cussword-evasion” or both.
Dalgoda: Well, that only applies if the characters are speaking English and the story is set in the historical world. Westeros isn’t England. (“Fuck” is attested from 1503 and is probably older. “Shit” is Old English as a verb, and 1580s as a noun.)
I don’t know whether it was official censorship or not, but here’s my thought on why foul language may have taken longer to get into at least fantasy if not sci-fi:
Swearing was something traditionally associated with lower classes. One “swears like a sailor” after all rather than “swearing like an earl.” In general, early fantasy heros were expected to be noble, in deed at least, and usually in blood. If Aragorn went around saying “f— this s—!” every time something went wrong, it would be much harder to think of him as, “The High King whose return was prophesized and will bring peace to the land.” Fantasy heroes are supposed to be better than the run-of-the-mill human, and their language reflects that. In Martin’s books, his point is that these men aren’t in fact any better (and in many ways are worse) than the average man, and the language helps reenforce that point; it’s hard to think of any of his knights or kings as traditional heroes after hearing them talk the way they do. “Knights in shining armor” are in an entirely different category from “Knights who say ‘f—.'”
It doesn’t quite explain sci-fi, though, whose characters often are the equivalent of sailors. That may have more to do with the perception that sci-fi was a teenage boy’s genre, and publishers being more hesitant to include bad language in “children’s books.”
“I thought it was the sixties” – I don’t know about books, but it was 1969 and Love Chronicles by Al Stewart that, I think, first had “fucking” printed in the lyrics on the album cover. Interestingly, though, it wasn’t in swearing mode but explicitly sexual:
And where I thought that just plucking
The fruits of the bed was enough
It grew to be less like fucking
And more like making love
(Though I can’t help thinking of the last line as “And more like making luff”).
If Aragorn went around saying “f— this s—!” every time something
went wrong, it would be much harder to think of him as, “The High King
whose return was prophesized and will bring peace to the land.”
And once again we mourn the outdated Hollywood casting conventions that never even gave Samuel L Jackson a chance at that role.
Blimey, now there’s an idea: all-black, or at least all-non-white, Lord of the Rings! Casting suggestions please. I mean, apart from Morgan Freeman as Gandalf, which is a no-brainer. And given that Peter Jackson was intent on making the Elves into martial arts masters, I’d be entirely behind Chow Yun-Fat as Legolas…
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Swearing was something traditionally associated with lower classes./i>
Well, yes and no. I don’t know much about swearing norms pre-twentieth century (other than, for the ‘respectable’ working class and the middles and uppers, there was a sharp Victorian distinction between what you could and couldn’t say in front of a lady – so Trollope knows the word his unjust husband uses, but he can’t write it down in a novel which has a mixed, possibly primarily femal audience), but the twentieth century British stereotype was that the working class and the upper class cursed cheerfully, but the middle class didn’t swear as much; the least likely to swear of all were lower-middle class people.
But in Tolkien, of course, his views about the inherent nobility of good language comes in to play. Presumably you can’t swear at all in Quenya, Common Speech swearing doesn’t go much beyond ‘bloody’, and the Black Speech makes “The Wolf of Wall Street” sound lika vicarage tea party.*
* Note: actually, although everyone always apologies for swearing even quite mildly in front of vicars, they swear just as much as anyone else, at least in private….
I always get aggravated at 18th and 19th century literature (especially from England) where they go to the town of “H—” or talk to “Mr. R— and Mrs. T—“. Could they just not be bothered to come up with a name there? What the heck is up with that?
Interesting exchange with David G Hartwell back in the 2008 original posting on the general subject of offensive – for some values of offensive – language and national distribution (banned in Boston is bad for sales in Boston but may increase sales in some markets?).
The Stratemeyer syndicate barred even oh gosh and oh golly – reportedly used mostly by the Bobbsey Twins – as euphemisms for the Deity and so limiting in the intended juvenile market.
And of course Mr. Heinlein’s efforts to slip something past the publisher and into the hands of young adults are well known e.g. Star Beast. Maybe older editors lagged the younger readers.
Speaking of military in the 60’s I remember somebody who ran his unit on a morning jog singing their usual songs – but he led the route through family quarters and so attracted a severe talking to of the you just don’t fucking do that variety and a little more.
From a useage perspective I’d say my generation and immediately preceding used fuck and other such only when we and the general situation were already very tense or perhaps with the deliberate intent of increasing the tension in a social setting – something approaching fighting words especially in mixed company. Men at least have died subsequent to using foul language in mixed company when other men felt bound to defend somebody’s innocent ears or something.
Myself I like the way David Drake handles swearing generally in the Hammer’s Slammers – certainly the characters swear like troopers but the usage is modified – cleaned up if you will – by using alternative language that conveys the sense and usage of a timeless language. I wouldn’t find that it moved the story along to read fucking fuckers fucking fucked repeatedly.
Current usage among people only a little younger than I am to quite a bit younger seems to me more noise than information in context. Mr. Heinlein again has one of his characters – and I do believe Mr. Heinlein approved of the character and intended the description as praise for praiseworthy behavior – use an extensive accurate and specific vocabulary most of the time. Even in Starship Troopers not swaring like a trooper but limiting profanity to times and places where I do believe highly tense might be a good description. There are some class issues in Starship Troopers – maybe the merchant mariners swear liberally.
Fuck as universal praise and condemnation both shocks me and takes quite a bit of focus to decode. It annoys my ear just as much as the much parodied Valley Speak.
@8
That’s still done in moderni lit fiction, i.e. Jonathan Franzen