Babel Clash

Tom’s point about the idea of infallible & omnipresent gods being a relatively recent innovation in human history got me thinking about deities in fantasy that are no where near perfect or omniscient.  Some of my favorites from the list I came up with are Galactus, Devourer of Worlds, Cthulu who brings to light the insignificance of humanity, and the Authority from Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials Trilogy (the Authority happens to be my personal favorite fallible deity).  Why do I love these deities?  Because they’re not perfect.  They’re destructive or frail or overwhelming or chaotic.  I find them more compelling because they’re not perfectly knowledgeable or perfectly benevolent.  I guess I want a little snap and pizazz and uncertainty from my deities.

Anyway, thinking about the last two also led me to this fun poll . . . Cage Match 2010.

My problem with writing these kind of gods into anything I wrote is that I’d have to create a plausible working backstory for it all — how gods work, how does one get to become a god, why do different gods have different powers, and how does worship work if unlike our own religion, where the ‘word of god’ can be interpreted in any number of different ways, here you can actually ask the guy himself.

Maybe there’s something in my Jewish half that makes that strike me as a good opportunity for comedy.   How disappointed the Jews would be if god himself could actually tell them what he meant when he said ‘x’, because it would deprive them of something to argue about.

I guess I’m more of a sociologist than a pure fantasist, I don’t write raw fantasy just to create something fantastical, I’m always writing about how stuff works in the real world.   Because there’s plenty of stuff that’s pretty amazing and even fantastical in the real world.   But I enjoy READING good raw fantasy, that’s different.

In honour of ME we’re going to talk about gods – I like how that sounds. I have to agree with Joel on one (the one major) point about gods, namely that mortals must control their own fate.

To take a slight diversion, what’s bugged me about many novels, TV series and other things is the existence of prophecy – it’s a millstone about the neck of so much and unless you specifically have a plan for it, it’s a lazy excuse for not thinking a plot through. While it’s often not specified as to the origin of the prophecy they’re in the same boat as a divine, ineffable plan, so most of the time you just need to follow the script and the world will be saved.

Needless to say I’ve always found that very boring – they may both have their place in novels, but use them in the wrong way and it’ll backfire. Taking away the importance of actions and their consequences is most definitely the wrong way to go about fiction and the right way to leave your reader wondering why they bothered getting to the end.

Fantasy worlds tend to involve some sort of the supernatural and whatever part of the whole spectrum it involves, it allows for the possibility of beings beyond normal constraints. Now you don’t have to use them, but the more magic involved the more likely, to my mind anyway, there will be gods and monsters – it tends to be a form that involves power and the capacity for unlimited change so they’re a logical consequence and once you’ve got that, they’re characters with their own set of rules. The idea of an infallible, intangible and omnipresent god is a relatively recent one in human history (or at least throughout the majority I believe) and as a plot device sounds a pretty lazy one to me. And if you’re going to have them, they’re going to want to get involved in whatever’s going on.

Most importantly, they’re fun, or at least they can be! Being long-lived and more powerful than humans doesn’t mean they always do the right thing or fail to make mistakes – it just means the consequences of their actions are proportionately grand and destructive. Their potential impact on a world is not infinite and would most likely be far less than a GSU from a Culture novel – what you do with them is up to you but don’t ignore them. If a world has magic and gods, then factor them in, don’t just use them as window-dressing. Otherwise you run the risk of your creation lacking the depth and consistency it deserves.

I understand that in honor of Tom, we’re also going to talk about Gods, and whether they should intervene directly in the story or not.

Well, that depends.   Probably in telling this kind of story, you’re being inspired by the Greek or Roman pantheons of very interventionist Gods who are a long way from any modern, secular notion of benevolent indifference.   And you can’t really critique whether it’s the ‘right thing’ to do in a story or not, because this kind of story is almost a sub genre in its own right, and saying it’s silly is to write off the entire sub genre, to say nothing of a big chunk of ancient Greek and Roman culture.

But to do it in a modern storytelling context, there’s some obvious pitfalls — for one, can your Gods be defeated?   This is kind of important, because if they’re going to be bossing our mortal characters, the mortals are going to need to get their own back every now and again, because otherwise there’s no resolution to the drama.   Why fight against someone you can never defeat?

The biggest danger that I see in this kind of story is that the Gods will suck the dramatic life out of the mortals, because the mortals need to hold the dramatic fate of the story in their own hands.   So the Gods need to be restrained in some way, because otherwise our mortals may as well not bother getting out of bed in the morning.

But anyway, over to Tom…

Before we leave the topic of gender and sexual politics entirely, I thought I would bring up a link that was submitted by a Babel Clash reader a few months ago.  The author makes some very good points about difference between strong - physically speaking - female characters and strong characters who happen to be female.  I particularly enjoyed the idea that “the feminists shouldn’t have said “we want more strong female characters.”  They should have said “we want more WEAK female characters.”  Not “weak” meaning “Damsel in Distress.”  “Weak” meaning “flawed.””  Anyway, check it out.

Why Strong Female Characters Are Bad for Women

Funny how this conversation moved so quickly onto sex and gender!

I thought I’d drag it a little back toward the initial question of capabilities (if that’s okay with everyone) and keep it fresh by answering a question I get asked a bit at conventions and such — namely given my more subversive attitude toward gender in general, what are my interests that inform my attitudes?   Or in other words, it’s another variation in the old ‘where do you get your ideas?’ question.

Well I follow a bunch of stuff on the internet for one thing.   Women’s sports always interested me, because it combines my sociological interest with my love of sport.   I’m intrigued, for example, at how bad women’s coaching is in most sports.   Take women’s tennis.   For some odd reason, women’s tennis coaches from young ages teach the girls to play completely differently from boys.   Women, they reason, can’t play like men, should produce shots differently, etc.   They should all be tall, powerful, and hit flat with no clearance over the net because women can’t generate power any other way, right?   And the result can be ugly.

I saw this when I was involved with women’s basketball in Australia as a reporter.   Women can’t play offence, just teach them to play defence.   Only then a few players emerged who could play offence, players like Lauren Jackson and Penny Taylor, and they blew all their competition away.   Likewise in tennis, tiny Justine Henin (my favorite) did the impossible and played just like a man, and blows much larger girls off the court.   Turns out that power is a function of technique as much as muscle.

Which is how I know that ‘separate but equal’, when applied to male and female in most arenas and not just sports, is stupid.   There’s what works, and what doesn’t work.   Unfortunately for women, men often get access to what works, and women are told they can’t be like men, so they’re told to do something else — what doesn’t work.   And sports in this way is a pretty good model of what happens in a lot of other areas of society.

And it’s amazing how much in sports has informed my fantasy writing, especially on sword fighting.   Nearly every sport you look at, footwork is the huge, underrated thing.   Same with martial arts — footwork comes first, everything else is second, because if you’re not balanced, you’re useless.   Hard work and self-centered determination are similarly important, and in ‘A Trial of Blood and Steel, Sasha’s personality is influenced to some extent from watching sportspeople, and seeing the huge egos and narrow-focused attitudes.   It’s not always pretty, but it’s necessary, to be that good at something.

To be a good writer, I think you have to be interested in SOMETHING, because that something is what informs your work.   Doesn’t have to be sports, you just need to find stuff interesting.   Any most good writers have their own stuff that intrigues them, however obscure.

Sexual politics may be part of the reticence to write overtly sexual characters but that isn’t the only reason a lot of male fantasy writers shy away from it in my opinion. First and foremost, it’s outside the comfort zone for them – on a basic level, the more you explore female traits and characteristics the easier it is to just get it wrong. That’s one reason why I’m so glad my principle editor is a woman; Lou’s great for bouncing ideas off but I’ve really seen the value of being aware Jo will give me a ‘friendly’ clout round the head if/when I get something wrong on the female characters.

So first we have the fact that it’s one more thing to learn, writing female characters, and the more you explore them the greater the chance female readers will disagree with your efforts. Secondly, the more sexuality we have, the more the book can be classified in someone’s head as something else. I walked into Waterstones today and say a display that said ‘Dark fantasy’ (as I went to rearrange the SFF shelves to make my books more prominent – don’t judge, we all do it!) but what they meant by dark fantasy was actually the romantic fantasy that increasingly is nothing more than erotica with window dressing. That in itself has a readership that often won’t be picking up Stormcaller or Sasha on the next shelf, because it’s only the veneer of fantasy that they want, nothing more.

Thirdly, sex scenes (a likely result of overt sexuality in a novel) in fantasy are often either trite, cliched and at least faintly ridiculous or, well, a bit too gritty and realistic. The one sex scene in Joe Abercombie’s First Law series stuck in the memory for the wrong reasons, as erotic as pigs rutting (if they rut, or is there another term?) and distracted from the rest of the book rather. Unless you make it look like a period drama with overblown romance, you run the risk of having a mix of sweat, mud and bodily fluids that comes across faintly disgusting and weird.

But having said all of that, the more you rounded and real a character, the better their influence on the whole novel. If they’re a sexual person, you can’t hide from that and you’ll embarrass yourself by doing so. Doranei, a major character in the Twilight Reign, only got to that position because a female character, Zhia, started flirting with him and derailed the scene – creating a whole extra plot thread that has hugely benefited the series and that would never have happened without Zhia being sexually aggressive. But with the rise of Twilight and other fantasy romance, are mainstream fantasy books free to do more on that front, or increasingly constrained in what they can show without being looked (even further) down upon?

I think there’s some sexual politics at work here too.   Ever since hard line feminism made it politically incorrect to portray female characters as too sexual, there’s been a reluctance from a lot of male writers to even go there.   I ran into this a little bit from a small number of responses to my lead character in the ‘Cassandra Kresnov Series’, who is very sexual, and a few female readers supposed this was because I was writing out some kind of male fantasy.   Well no, I did it because it suited the character, and humanised her in a way that relieved doubts about her humanity, and I reckon those complaints say more about the reader’s attitude to sexuality than mine.   I think some male writers know that every well rounded character needs some kind of sexuality, but aren’t game to wade into that sexual politics as a male writer, and steer clear of it.   Maybe this is why the very un-PC 1930s produced more leading women in Hollywood than is often the case even today.

I was thinking about this watching DVDs of Farscape, and reflecting that the character of Chiana (played by Gigi Edgley) was unlike almost anything you’ll see on TV — a ‘loose woman’ prone to seducing anything male just for fun, but who is also tough, smart, likable and is given some of the show’s best one liners.   And the fact that it’s so rare that this type of character should be likable and even heroic is pretty sad, because it shows that popular culture still has a problem with female sexuality, with women who are overtly sexual in any way still insulted and disrespected, or otherwise treated as though they are no more than the sum of their sexual parts, while male characters are held to an entirely different standard.   That’s not to say that good female characters HAVE to be very overtly sexual, Sasha in ‘A Trial of Blood and Steel’ is fairly restrained in that regard thanks to her honour code (which regulates who she sleeps with as well as who she kills).   But I think there’s a lot of confusion on the portrayal of female sexuality in all popular culture, and if characters aren’t allowed full access to all of their human dimensions, they’ll be dull.

Besides which, a lot of fantasy is fundamentally conservative, or has characters that live in worlds that are very conservative by today’s measure, and let’s face it, there aren’t many dramatic uses for old fashioned ‘virtuous women’.   And I gotta say it, if a traditionally minded director like Steven Spielberg can go an entire career without figuring out how to write a single interesting female character, it’s no surprise some fantasy writers are struggling too.

I’d certainly agree there yes, that some women in fantasy do fulfil that role, and it does make me think that for one reason or another, there’s usually more purpose/consequence in putting a woman into a fantasy plot than a man, unconscious or not. Chuck another bloke in and half the time it doesn’t change the dynamic, make them a woman instead and she often becomes a plot catalyst as characters change how they react around her. It’s a role that requires far more care and thought from the writer than most I suspect, unless you’ve got a gender parity in the book anyway in which case the dynamic’s different. And perhaps that tells us something about the genders – a group of women will change behaviour with the introduction of a man to some degree, but I doubt it would be near the same extent as a group of men and one woman.

And of course, the point of tricksters in a novel tends to be to spark something off or introduce the change-around that takes matters in an unexpected direction and lift a scene from the mundane to the interesting. Most fantasies need something that takes them away from simply brute force winning out or the dark lord’s armies tend to win and make the book quite short. I’m not saying that’s always women at all, often it’s a man effectively saying to themselves: I have to do this another way, my default position just isn’t good enough (and the default position is often to run up screaming and chop someone off at the knees).

As Joel and a lot of writers explore a more equal balance in their novels, that ‘traditional’ role may well be changing (which is a good thing, just to be clear – the genre evolving can only ever be good) so what in the future will be the detail that changes the dynamic of a plot? Most likely unconsciously, how will writers change around this new set of mental guidelines?

I’ve come up with so many reasons why I like writing female characters, but I think what it all boils down to is that I like contrasts. Good SF&F creates a contrast between the real and the imagined worlds, and by that contrast, draws the subject into clearer relief. Likewise, putting a woman into a role more traditionally reserved for men creates a contrast between audience expectations, which are often subconscious, and the reality being presented. It makes everything fresher and more interesting, and as a writer it makes me consider things that I might otherwise have just taken for granted.

On Terry’s point, women in the role of trickster, I think there’s something to that… but on the other hand, many character types can play that role, I don’t think there’s anything inherently female about it. My key point is that different genders, in a medieval-style society in particular, will have to do things differently. Difference makes contrast, and contrast makes drama and thus entertainment. When everyone’s all the same, in any respect, I get bored, as a reader and a writer.

On Tom’s point about the role of frailty, I agree that frailty’s only fun when imposed upon a character who’s not accustomed to it. And here all the Buffy fans can recall the episode where, like, Buffy totally lost her powers, and like, it was so cool, ‘cause she couldn’t kick butt so easily, and she was all like, totally freaked out ‘cause she had to use her head and stuff instead of just beating things up? In ‘Petrodor’ I have a scene where Sasha is imprisoned, and writing how this hyperactive, hot tempered fighter handles doing nothing for a while was actually lots of fun.

I don’t really know if women’s relative scarcity in fantasy makes them more or less important to the plot — ‘A Trial of Blood and Steel’ is about evenly split, gender wise. And as the main character is female, there ends up being more ‘page time’ given to women than men. I can’t find fault in most fantasy for not having more female characters in the sense that I know my history and sociology and women in this world just don’t feature in big historical events like men do. But then, we’re talking about fantasy, not history. So if fantasy writers are excluding female characters from their stories, are they doing it out of concern for any sort of ‘accuracy’ (why should real world accuracy matter in a land of magic and dragons?) or merely to represent a medieval-style society that they feel personally most comfortable with? I say the latter. Which I find a little dull.