Babel Clash

A non sequitur, because of a story I’ve just finished.

In fact, a collection: George RR Martin’s Dream Songs II, which I thoroughly recommend (1). This story, the last before the extensive bibliography, was Portraits of His Children.

The premise is simple: the protagonist, an author, is visited, Christmas Carol-like, by a number of his own creations. There’s a great deal more to it than that, which I won’t spoil (2), but it got me thinking. First I thought, “oh, that would be fantastic.” Then I considered a little more and changed my mind.

My first ever hero was called Anglesteel (4) and I would not want to meet him on a dark night, or at all, for that matter. He was a vicious, driven murderer with the emotional development of a thirteen year old whose only virtue was that, for some reason, he was on the right side in shall-we-stop-the-Dark-Lord debate(5). In this, in fact, he was a direct precursor, a memetic ancestor, of my Mantis-kinden weaponsmaster, Tisamon,  but Anglesteel didn’t even have a Stenwold Maker to keep him in line and give him direction. Bleak, humourless and self-righteous, he was nobody’s idea of a perfect dinner guest.

That got me to wondering which literary heroes you actually would want to meet. Fantasy is, in fact, not the best place to go recruiting people for a cocktail party. A great many protagonists are borderline psychotics with hair-trigger tempers, whether the writer realizes it or not (at age 18 I would have vigorously defended Anglesteel) who would most likely have the police round before desert. Aragorn and Edric Stark brood too damn too much. David Gemmel’s tough old heroes would weigh me in the balance of their frontiersman morality and find me not worth their time. Conan and the Grey Mouser would steal the spoons and lord knows what else. Locke Lamora would get everyone to invest in a Ponzi scheme. Elric would at least be able to keep a conversation up, when he was on just enough drugs and not too much, but he’d be bound to hang his sword in the hall and someone would end up cutting themselves when they went to get their coat. Inquisitor Glokta would be a reasonable guest if he wasn’t so consumed with self-loathing as to view any kind of hospitality as an insult.

The genuinely good heroes would be insufferable and highlight everyone else’s flaws (c.f. Superman), the dark, brooding heroes would just be waiting for an excuse to kick off (Tisamon). The stiff-backed military types would be stuffy (Temeraire’s Will Laurence), whilst the genius types like Isaac dan der Grimnebulin and Baltazar Casaubon would just get annoyed at how slow everyone else was. Meanwhile the detectives, like George’s Maurice Newbury, would be watching you all the time, and by the end of the meal they’d have a catalogue of absolutely everything you’d ever done wrong. The villains would have better conversation but would also make sure you didn’t last to the end of the meal. The idealized heroines would be boring, the roguish ones like Lyra Bellaqua would steal any spoons that Conan had somehow overlooked. The avenging ones would stab someone with a fish-knife even before the starters got to the table. Granny Weatherwax would scare the pips out of just about everyone (6).

Bardas Loredan, from KJ Parker’s Colours in the Steel, would actually be a lovely dinner guest, but pretty much anyone he talked to would die horribly almost immediately afterwards.  I’d probably get on quite well with Lukyanenko’s Anton, too, if only I could speak Russian.

So I’m open to suggestions, for the notional party. Who would you invite?

(1) In fact, anyone with an interest in writing is advised to get hold of the two Dream Songs collections - not just for the stories themselves, which are of course excellent, but because of the episodic autobiography that Martin prefaces the sections with. As he’s definitely one of the Grand Old Men of epic fantasy, his own reflections on the ups and downs (indeed several quite staggering downs that a lesser man might not have crawled back from) makes for inspiring, fascinating and frightening reading.

(2) Martin marks it as an autobiographical story, and it is certainly that story that writers tell of all the bad characteristics that writers can have (3): the protagonist is cold, detached, a ruthless user and observer, callous about the real world and caring only about writing, and yet despite presenting us with what should be an essentially unlikable character, Martin makes sure that the man is, in some awful way, admirable. His arrogance and misplaced priorities are given just enough spin by Martin, the writer writing about writers, to make them almost virtues.

(3) Another good example is Stephen King’s Misery. Behind the horror story is a writer desperate to tell the world about writing, and all the pitfalls it sets for the unwary.

(4) A name I still intend to find a use for.

(5) This was a hell of a long time ago. I was young. Give me a break.

(6) and steal the spoons.

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