Babel Clash

Hey Matt: It is interesting how much fantasists have to think about what’s real and how to make use of it for our unreal worlds—-more than many writers of realistic fiction, I bet. Actually, I like C.S. Lewis on realism. He says there’s a difference between “realism of content” (a story that somehow expresses truths about the real world, e.g. This novel tells the unvarnished brutal tale of a man’s struggle to clip his toenails, the women who loved him, and the dog who despised him!) and “realism of presentation” (the nubbly details that embody experience—-”the touches that make for life” as Zelazny puts it). I think both of these matter for fantasy, though maybe the distance between them is greater than it is for mainstream fiction.

For instance, from LotR there’s Frodo’s gruesome encounter with Bilbo in Rivendell, after Bilbo asks to see the Ring: “[Frodo] found himself eyeing a little wrinkled creature with a hungry face and bony groping hands. He felt a desire to strike him.” It’s the physical details that carry the emotional weight, here (realism of presentation), but the idea that Frodo is gradually becoming subject to desire for the Ring and its power, overriding his natural affection, strikes me as very plausible—-realism of content: I’m sure someone might react that way. The trick is, of course, there is no ring of power; there never was. Yet this is exactly how someone would react to it if it did exist. Any fiction writer has to be realistic about things that never happened; fantasists have to be realistic about things that never could have happened.

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I think the moments in fantasy which are the most fun for me (both as reader and as writer) are when the storyteller is tackling this paradox head on, telling a tall tale with a straight face and a wealth of plausible details. In This Crooked Way, there’s one point where someone makes a blade out of moonlight and cuts someone else open with it, replacing his heart with a stone. (It’s not malicious; the goal is to save the guy’s life.) This, of course, could never happen. But I tried to fill in the blanks of this impossible event with a mosaic of real things:

“He placed the heart in the jar of cold water. It quickly sank to the bottom, heavy with unshed blood and tal, pulsing futilely like a fish without fins. Water ran over the rim. He drew the wax tablet from the hot water and pressed it over the mouth of the cold jar, sealing the heart inside.”

If this works, it works because readers are saying to themselves, “This can’t really happen. But if it did…”

Dominic Harman, cover for "Blood of Ambrose"

Other real things that give me pleasure and pain in my own fiction are the pieces of other people’s imagination I’ve sawn off and tried to work into my own world. Merlin, for instance. Maybe that was a mistake, Merlin being a character with such a long cultural history (about whom so many people have such specific and conflicting ideas). But Morlock was Merlin’s son almost from the moment he emerged out of my subconscious; I felt like he wasn’t really Morlock unless he was Morlock Ambrosius. That opens a whole host of problems, though. Who’s Morlock’s mother, Nimue/Vivian or someone else? Should I call her Nimue or Vivian? What’s the relationship between Arthur’s Britain and Morlock’s Laent?

Dominic Harman, cover for "This Crooked Way"

I figured there was no percentage in appropriating the Merlin legend and leaving Nimue out of it, so she is Morlock’s mother, as well as the mother of his sister(s). And I realized I didn’t have to choose between her names: as a Romanized Briton of the 5th century AD she might well have a Celtic name (if “Nimue” is Celtic) and Latin name (”Viviana”). This lets me sneak a little Latin into the texts, too. (Everything is better with Latin!™) And, at a couple of points in This Crooked Way, Nimue quite casually drops names that can only come from Earth. The names (at least one of them will be pretty familiar to readers) look weird in that imaginary-world context but they belong there to indicate that she doesn’t belong there: she is the stranger in that strange land.

One of the things bedevilling me last year, when I was writing This Crooked Way, was partisan politics. It kept trying to force its way into the book, which annoyed me very much. I’m as partisan as the next guy–assuming the next guy is some kind of fiery-eyed zealot. (”I’m a bigot. But for the left.”) But I feel there are parts of every culture and every person that should extend beyond who-you-voted-for-in-the-last-election-and-why-that-makes-you-the-devil, the culture-war crap that has been poisoning our culture for fifteen or twenty years now, at least. And I hate it when a writer tries to make partisan political points in the middle of a story: I hate it when Poul Anderson does it; I hate it when Ursula Le Guin does it; I don’t care if I agree with the points or not. Someone telling me a story about dragons and unicorns is engaged in more important business than giving me voting instructions in the next election. If they don’t understand that, I do, and I can hurl the book across the room to prove it. (Actually, it proves nothing except that I have poor impulse control, which needs no proof, but never mind that.)

Still, there it was trying to sneak into my sword-and-sorcery novel that was supposed to be an escape hatch from all that stuff. My solution was to let it in, and then make it work for me. I made Narkunden, one of the cities north of the Kirach Kund, into a conservative nightmare of a liberal utopia, where everything is regulated, right down to the last zombie.

“Savage Triumphator!” he groaned. “An unregistered zombie!”
“Don’t worry,” I said. (The poor thrept seemed really horrified.) “It’s dead, or dezombied, or whatever you call it.”
“You don’t understand!” he wailed. “That just creates more paperwork: unauthorized deactivization of an unregistered zombie is itself a code-violation. There will be incident reports and witness affidavits and second-death certificates and tax assessments on the labor of the zombie and tax-penalty assessments on the unpaid labor taxes… I’ll be in the office all night long. And I’d promised to take my non-obligated semi-partner Zaria to the election rally this evening out at Remer Fields.”

Whereas Aflraun, its sister city across the Nar, is a liberal nightmare of a conservative utopia where only money talks and armed thugs roam the streets pestering people:

There were more duels, too, all over the place: I was splashed with blood three different times by the time I reached my destination. Disgusting. Narkunden might be as dull as dishwater, but at least it was clean dishwater: you could go about your business without swaggering bravoes waving their blood-soaked swords at passersby.

As for my current novel, it’s an election year in Wuruyaaria, the werewolf city, when Morlock arrives there, and that’s giving me a chance to vent some more about the excesses of partisanship.

So I guess my working rule about reality is, if it tries to use you, use it first.

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