Africa, the Overworld, and the Other

It should cause no real controversy to say the adventure genre is – more or less – dead. 

Yes, some may challenge this on the technicality that there are writers in the indie publishing space attempting to resuscitate it. But you don't resuscitate something that is alive and well. There’s a reason the common question regarding the genre’s demise is not “whether,” but “why.” More and more people are starting to realize that something has gone missing.

Did we somehow forget what an Adventure entails? 

Well, obviously. But we forgot in a very specific way, one that becomes apparent with little more than a brief glance at Adventure touchstones of years past. For the purposes of this piece, we’ll use the classic King Solomon’s Mines (Haggard) and the more cult-y Eyes of the Overworld (Vance). Aligning those two texts and shining a light through their pages just so happens to reveal a perfect map to the lost core of Adventure storytelling – and why it got buried in the first place.

One glimpse at the cover is enough to know that Vance’s Overworld is a place of strangeness. A man stands in a Ren Faire hat and yellow tights, his cotton-candy cape swirling in the wind. He contemplates a ball of snow-white tendrils held aloft in one hand. A giant mushroom looms up behind him, and in the distance lies a forest – or a mineral formation? – of indeterminate origin. And then there’s the weird things with eyes.

The man is Cugel the Clever, a rogue’s rogue who sets out to find and retrieve a particular magical artifact. In doing this, he hopes to placate Iuconou the Laughing Magician, who caught him in the act of filching a sack’s worth of magical artifacts from his manse. 

The cover does not lie! Cugel’s adventure does indeed take him to all kinds of bizarre places filled with even more bizarre beings, like a village whose hideous inhabitants live out an idyllic altered reality with the aid of violet lenses permanently affixed to their eyes, or a mine created for the purposes of unearthing a unique jelly-like creature.

But despite the sheer oddness of Cugel’s tale, its basic structure is pretty straightforward – no, scratch that. It's downright familiar. It’s very nearly the exact same type of story as Allan Quatermain’s hunt for African diamonds in King Solomon’s Mines. Maybe that’s to be expected; a treasure hunt is a treasure hunt, after all. But the similarity goes deeper than structure; these two stories are just as alike in the way they both feel. Under Haggard’s pen, the traversal of Africa takes on very nearly the same strangeness as Cugel’s trek across the Overworld.

Haggard’s Africa feels as different from the world we know as Mars is. The brutal violence of an elephant attack seems ominous and eerie. The enormous cruelty of Africa’s mountains and deserts eludes rational understanding. The witch-hunting rituals of the native Kukuana tribe, which make The Crucible look like a quinceanera, feel as inscrutable as any practice of the fictional societies in the Overworld.

The illusion of journeying across an alien world is so complete that, when the moon rises and silvers the African landscape, it’s easy to forget this is the same disc that casts light on the streets of Dallas or Detroit. Haggard has taken us far from what we thought we knew, into a new realm of possibilities laced with astonishment and danger.

And it’s this, more than the goal of riches or the constant changing of the scenery, that makes it an Adventure. Adventure is about coming face to face with something completely outside yourself.

Which is the exact thing the modern reader fears to find.

See, in the modern parlance, to write of foreign realms and (especially) foreign people with the astonishment or horror or awe we see in Solomon's Mines is to “Other” them. Othering is bad, because it places the foreign beyond the realm of the normal. The exotic inevitably comes under judgment. 

For a Westerner like Haggard to do this to the Africans – in a world shaped by the excesses of colonialism no less – is viewed as irresponsible, possibly even cruel. And so anything that reacts to the exotic as exotic, any Western character who holds to his Western values in the face of the new and the strange, is viewed as an accomplice to the worst habits of the colonial era.

Readers must keep a safe distance from the likes of Haggard, just as they must with Kipling, or Howard, or any number of classic Westerns, or Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom… anything that languishes in a Western-centric point of view on the rest of the world.

This would seem like a great opportunity for stories like Eyes of the Overworld to take Adventure safely elsewhere, but speculative fiction won’t be a harbor from this inquisition much longer. In these depressingly literal days, Othering a fantasy race is hardly more respectable than Othering an earthly one. Even an author of the fantastic as renowned as Professor Tolkien is in danger of acquiring the same “problematic” label already affixed to colonials like Haggard or Kipling, on account of Middle-earth’s wholly invented Others like the orcs and Easterlings.

In short, the Western tendency to colonize is at best ignorant, and at worst malicious, and it must be stripped from the literary world root and branch. Or so they say.

The irony of this is that many of the writers known for their tendency to Other – men like Haggard, Kipling, and now Tolkien – spent a good chunk of their lives directly immersed in other cultures, both physically and intellectually. 

Tolkien was born in South Africa; his father actually died there. Most of his adulthood was famously spent marinating in the languages and customs of long-dead cultures. Kipling was born in India and worked there for years as a journalist. Haggard lived in South Africa for the better part of a decade and called the Zulus the “finest savage race in the world.” Englishmen all, to be sure, but hardly a set of writers who don’t know or care about the peoples of foreign lands.

Even if you didn’t know their biographical details, their writing has depth all on its own. Early on in Solomon’s Mines, Allan Quatermain explicitly shares his distaste for the slur “nigger” and strikes it from his vocabulary. He muses on the definition of a “gentleman,” concluding that you’re as likely to find one wrapped in black skin as in any lighter shade. Of course, he also never stops viewing his own culture as more civilized than the ones he encounters elsewhere, but he’s also well aware that to the Kukuanas, the English way seems the eternally strange one.

Sure, plenty of Adventures adopt a more adversarial stance than this, but they can be defended other ways at other times. The point here is that any fair reader will see that regarding a person as the Other is not the same as refusing to acknowledge his humanity, or even his dignity.

Of course, fair readers are not what the modern world intends to create – which is a shame. Not just because it renders the modern reader functionally illiterate, but because endlessly worrying about the moral failures of Othering neglects the important moral opportunities the Other presents.

Encountering the Other is not a disposable act, because it also enables us to encounter our own Self. Red contrasts with green so strongly because it is not green. This is one of the reasons people like to travel. You haven’t fully grasped what an American is until you spend time in London or Frankfurt or Shanghai. Allan Quatermain learns things about himself in King Solomon’s Mines that he would simply never have known without the chance to look upon the Other in his lands and his ways and admit of his curiosity, awe, and fear.

Entwined with this simple inward truth is a more complex, outward one: The encounter of the Other is the location of true ethical responsibility. 

“If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others?” The writers of the scriptures assume man loves himself. The challenge is for man to love others. But how can he love others without acknowledging the Other? There’s an arrogance here on the part of the modern reader; in disposing of the Other and the Exotic he has assumed a sort of incurious omnipotence. He has robbed the people of strange places of their ability to astonish him with their goodness and sin. If modern ethics manages to eliminate the Other, it will also eliminate the opportunity for true charity and love.

But high-mindedness aside, the simple reality is that Adventure will always demand we face the wondrous and strange peoples and places of this world – and worlds unknown. If the modern reader eradicates Othering and Exoticism, he will eradicate the Other and the Exotic along with them, and thus spurn Adventure before it can even knock on the door.

This would be a tragedy. It already has been.

And yet, for all the attempts to silence it, the call to Adventure still sounds, timid but unmistakable, through the endless babble of the current year. Those who hear it should not fear to strike out – unapologetically – and risk the discovery of things wondrous and terrible and strange, whether in the dark heart of Africa, the deep caverns of the Overworld, or the ever-shifting sands of the human soul.