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.

Ah, Viriconium…

Briefly off-topic, but the “dying earth” stories of Harrison, Vance, Charan-Newton and others are worthy of essays in and of themselves… (and Vance, the grand-daddy of the genre, writes in a principally rural setting, as contrast).

George hits the nail on the head with Steampunk settings - the genre kicks off in Victorian London. In a sense that’s not even the most logical place for it - the actual industrial revolution was a fair sight earlier, and there’s no reason you couldn’t have steam-tanks slugging it out at Waterloo, or even fifty years before that. Victorian London has one grand advantage, however, in that it’s one of the best known periods of history. Dickens, Conan-Doyle, Jack the Ripper, Victoria herself, it’s an age of very iconic historical and fictional characters that most readers already have at least a passing understanding of - whatever nation they’re from (1).

This existing familiarity is a great aid to the writer, because steampunk settings are usually about change. A writer of the traditional gazeteer fantasy stories we’ve been talking about presents you with a fantastical setting that in itself is static - a backdrop for the journey and the deeds of the hero. The steampunk world is usually going through the throes of revolutions both social and technological (and indeed the technological driving the social, something that seldom happens in classical fantasy). Increased automation, faster and more available modes of transport, advances in manufacturing, developments in warfare, all conspire to overthrow the old and settled ways of life, to disrupt the barriers of social class, to sow unrest in politics. This is the meat and drink of steampunk - the actual steam itself, the technology that is the most obvious fantastical element, is usually second fiddle to the social dynamics that it creates (2).

It makes a great deal of sense, therefore, to use an existing backdrop in order to highlight the changes that the writer is introducing. Most steampunk settings are therefore also alternate history settings, with the technology standing as the chief originating divergence. As well as George’s own work, other good examples of this include Keyes’ Age of Unreason, where the setting is considerably earlier than Victoria, and more global, and has characters luke Ben Franklin and Isaac Newton playing major roles, and, of course, Sterling and Gibson’s (3) The Difference Engine, one of the giants in the genre.

Steampunk has, however, also began to gather some secondary worlds to itself, as George notes (4). This is a delicate line, with the writer having to at once introduce  a world that is wholly alien to the reader, and also, in some respects, to itself, as it changes and evolves during the book. The masters of this kind of fiction are China Mieville (Perdido Street Station), Jeff Vandermeer (Cities of Saints and Madmen) (6) and Stephen Hunt (The Court of the Air) (7), They provide is with worlds that, although they may echo ours, are wholly distinct, where the human denizens rub shoulders casually with the alien, and yet where the chief concerns, of characters, of societies and of cities, are no less real for it. Possibly it’s the case that the familiarity with real history has now been augmented by a familiarity with the tropes of secondary worlds, a common toolbox of the fantastic born from a genre that has now sufficient decades under its belt to produce a broad class of reader ready for books that change a large number of the axioms at once (8), standing (to bring things back to Newton for no reason other than neatness) on the shoulders of giants. Or maybe on the shoulders of lots and lots of smaller people. Anyway, the view’s fine.

(1) mostly because the British Empire was so very, very outgoing and keen on exporting itself to everywhere it possibly could.

(2) One wonderful exception to this is Phil and Kaja Foglio’s ongoing Girl Genius webcomic, where the technology, and the prodigcal inventors that utilize it, really are the point. The Foglio’s creation, which manages that very rare balancing act of being consistently hilarious while at the same time deadly serious, is set, for reference, in an alternate history real world with some recognizable landmarks (such as England for example), although much of the world has been changed and devastated by steampunk technology run riot.

(3) Gibson’s and Sterling’s? Two writers of considerable seniority, and I don’t want to sleight either of them…

(4) And there is also a genre-territory which comprises very similar social fantasies that do not involve steam, some of them simply presenting entirely fantastic secondary worlds used to echo and examine real history, usually without magic (Manners-punk is the rather awkward phrase coined for them, and Gormenghast is probably the first, and also check out Fly-by-Night by Frances Harding, which is superb); others have similar socially-turbulent worlds where magic takes the place of the steam, and you should definitely check out Rats and Gargoyles by Mary Gentle (5). then we have Mr Mieville, referred to above, who does both and all of it, and then some.

(5) or, for that matter, pretty much anything else by Mary Gentle.

(6) In fact arguably Vandermeer spends two entire books introducing us to his city, its world, and how it develops, before spilling the beans in Finch. Also, Vandermeer’s work is clearly science fiction. Unless it’s fantasy. Possibly horror. We are at the edge of the void, with books like this, and the conditions are such that easy classification is one of the first casualties.

(7) Hunt’s world starts off slyly looking like a familiar London (ish) in order to catch the reader unawares shortly afterwards when we find out it really, really isn’t.

(8) You don’t have to go back far to find an age when fantastic fiction was almost always linked to the real world - either a remote part of it, or a remote time, but always with one foot back in the understood. Tolkien himself casts Middle Earth as an earlier age of our world, just as Howard did with Conan’s Hyperborea.

Following on…

Batman and Superman each have a city that they’re linked to, of course. It’s a traditional Superhero trope, to be a defender of such-and-such-opolis (1). Superman’s power scale makes him a defender of the earth, though - he can zip off into out space to fight the giant mind-controlling starfish at a moment’s notice, and the Metropolis connection is more to do with his secret identity, his civilian job and his girlfriend. Once in uniform he has a roving commute across the world and beyond.

Batman probably would be able to defeat the starfish, and might even be able to get there in the Batshuttle, but he’s unlikely to be the UN’s first choice, let’s face it. He is an urban crimefighter in a much more intimate way, and the landscapes of Gotham are grittier, gothier, but perhaps realler than gleaming Metropolis. When your hero is city-bound, in fact, an extra secret ingredient is added to any series (and superhero comics run to legendarily long stories, interrupted only by Crisis-style cosmic reboots or poor circulation). This is something that it took fantasy fiction a while to catch up on.

Traditional fantasy is rural. The base-stock, in fact, can be seen in Mallory, or romances such as Amadis of Gaul. The story is usually a journey from A to B, and if there is a “home base” it is frequently simply used as punctuation (return to Camelot for a slap up banquet before going out to smack another couple of dragons and a magician). The hero’s exploits take place as a series of mobile set pieces - castles of enchantment, knights guarding fords, monsters, maidens, the occasional tournament. Romances are episodic, with plenty of digression and relatively little thrusting plot. Later traditional fantasies have less digression and more plot, with the journey homing far more tightly towards Mount Doom, but the structure is still encounters like beads on a string (or several strings). Frequently it would not matter if the places and people the hero leaves behind simply popped out of existence the moment he turned his back - we will never see them again in any event. Conan (2) lives like this for most of his career, killing gods, beasties and evil high priests and going merrily on his way, Tolkien gives us travellogues (3), and most of the post-Tolkien fantasies follow in his footsteps but with less detail and less feeling. If there is a city, in these tales, it is one the hero visits, probably defends, and then leaves, and there is frequently precious little sense that the horde of barbarians/orcs/undead, despite burning half of it down and killing a third of the population, had any long term effect on the place whatsoever. The buildings were there to be burnt, the people to die tragically, to provide a backdrop to the hero’s deeds. It isn’t his city, after all.

The great secret here is no consequences. The reader never gets to see what happens next because we have a static camera on the hero while the landscape scrolls past as though we’re watching a coach in an old Western. When the hero has a grand fight with goblins, smashes up their temple and nicks their treasure, we see what happens to him, but not to them. If the surviving goblins go out and massacre every village of peasants within ten miles, the hero needn’t care. He’s done that bit, and wasn’t going back.

The city is different, for the heroes that call it home, because what you do there comes back to bite you. Every action, good or bad, has consequences that you have to live with, because, when the next day dawns, you’re still there. The world is less expendable, reckless heroics look less attractive, and quite possibly the bad guys know where you live. What this gives you is a story that has an advantage from the start in terms of depth, complexity and insight into human nature, because the hero’s humanity, or lack of it, is far more important, and intrinsic to his surroundings. The architecture of the setting becomes one of society, rather than geography.

This isn’t a new thing. Fritz Lieber’s dynamic duo always ended up back in Lankhmar, and Gormenghast is a marvellous example of a story where the setting is really more the hero (or villain?) than any of the actual characters.  However, the rural/urban balance has been massively dominated by the bucolic hack-and-slay gazeteer for quite a while. There has been a definite upsurge in urban fantasy recently, however, and I would argue (4) that the greater potential inherent in an urban setting, the ability to tell far more rounded, more human stories, is one major reason why. For a fistful of examples: anything you please written by China Mieville. Absolutely anything; ditto Jeff Vandermeer; Scott Lynch’s The Lies of Locke Lamora; Colours in the Steel, by KJ Parker; Pratchett’s Discworld series… and the list goes on. And urban settings are also (and here I begin steering the boat towards George’s neck of the woods particularly) a mainstay of the steampunk setting where the punk is at least as important as the steam, and where the plots frequently explicitly focus on a changing society, rather than a static one.

And here I’ll hand back to Mr M.

(1) And you wonder whether junior super heroes have to work their way up, starting off by being Defender of Sunnyspring (population 75), or keeping a solitary gas station safe from all harm.

(2) And don’t get me wrong, I have a great fondness for Howard’s Conan stories.

(3) superior ones, because of all the work he put into the world.

(4) I always do, as you’ll have twigged by now. Rhetoric for its own sake. Always a mistake to give a writer a soap box…

I have a problem with Superman. And that’s a shame because he’s an almighty juggernaut of superheroic power who could pound me into the ground with his eyebrows. And that’s the problem.

Superman has it made. He’s the envy of other superheroes (1). His capabilities are off the scale and he has no vulnerabilities. No sensible ones, anyway. If you have to invent a bogus mineral to menace your superhero then it isn’t a real vulnerability. Don’t forget, too, that when the Man of Steel was first let out on his own recognizance he was pitched against your ordinary everyday street thugs, with guns. Actual guns against a guy who was bulletproof. And super-fast, super-strong, able to fly, with all sorts of super-senses and heat vision and… well, the impression one has is that he could do whatever the writers wanted him to. What’s that, missed saving Lois Lane one of those many times? No worries, just spin the earth the wrong way to turn back time, eh? Nothing too good for Superman.

If Superman existed then the world would be terrified of him. We really would. It’s just as well that he’s paladin-good, wouldn’t hurt a fly, super-virtuous. And even then, can you imagine how many toes he’d tread on, in the real world? How many big corporations and dodgy politicians he’d end up crossing swords with, whether he meant to or not? Back when the Comics Code held tyrannical sway, of course, you couldn’t have public authority figures as bad guys, leaving Superman sitting happy in his morally uncomplicated world where the temporal authorities would happily let themselves be bailed out by a loose cannon with the power of a hydrogen bomb, from threats to destroy the world all the way down to petty bank robberies, no job too small. Even in later years, when the phenomenal overkill of Superman ended up being balanced by phenomenal overkill in villains, Superman was never going to lose. And even when they (briefly) killed him off, it was in a story highlighting how he was so much gosh-darned better than everyone else, so that only he, after the rest of the world’s heroes had failed, could save the day.

DC’s other big hitter is nowhere near so much of a big hitter, on general power scales. Batman is human, and Batman can be made morally ambiguous in a way that Superman can’t. Of course he can’t. If Batman goes off the rails in his quest for justice then he kills a few hoodlums. If Superman loses his rag he’d take out the Eastern Seaboard. Can you imagine Superman in Vietnam (2)? How about Iraq?

I’m not the only one who has this take on Earth’s Mightiest. In fact it seems as though the concept of Superman, all powerful and all virtuous, is something that makes people uncomfortable. We’re not convinced, basically, that all that punch is backed by the cast-iron morality that they tell is, in the same way that we’re not convinced that Oz is actually the saccharine wonderful place Baum makes it out to be (but that’s another story). After all, we live in a world where an awful lot of people routinely lie to us about their trustworthiness and, for better or for worse, our eyes are well and truly opened to it. As a brief scattershot of Superman models, most of which also include a go at his chums in the JLA, just check out:

-          Soon I Will Be Invincible, a gloriously entertaining novel by Austin Grossman. The Batman and Wonder Woman analogues get a sympathetic treatment, but it’s plain that Corefire, mightiest of mortals, is basically a jerk.

-          Top 10 by Alan Moore, where Atoman and his crew (who map fairly closely onto the Justice League) are arrogant big-money types with a particularly vile sideline (there’s also a vaguely Supermannish, and far more benign, character in Top 10: 69ers, interestingly).

-          The Boys by Garth Ennis, which makes Kick Ass look mild in the graphic violence stakes, and which not only provides us with an utterly sociopathic Superman mirror in Homelander, complete with vicious and self-absorbed JLA, but has a solid, vicious kick in the voonerables for the Avengers and the X-men while it’s on a roll (3)

In fact, the point I’m making is the raison d’etre of The Boys. Look at how the world’s celebrities and great magnates act, in a world where nobody dares tell them ‘no’. Now imagine if they could fly and bend steel bars. Do you really think Superman would be such a nice guy, given that nobody but nobody has any way of enforcing anybody’s laws over him? That kind of power makes a great villain, but in this day and age it’s hard to believe in it vested in a hero.

So why am I taking this opportunity to have a poke at Superman, given that I’m a fantasy writer and not a comic book supremo(4) ? Because heroic fantasy has had the same shift of consciousness. There is an old way of doing things, and the current set of fantasy writers has taken a long, hard look at it, and decided it’s the same “too good to be true” deal as Superman.

Basically, you take your hero. He’s probably a stableboy or similar menial, except he has a Destiny (5). Destiny figures big in this style of plot. Destiny says the hero will overthrow the Dark Lord. The prince then bumbles about the map until he’s done the grand tour, by which time he has acquired (a) the magic sword or similar piece of shenanigans, and (b) the girl (although he may subsequently have misplaced her), whereupon the Dark Lord is met and defeated, as per Destiny. At the end our chap assumes his kingdom, marries the girl, and is then somewhat stumped when the editors demand another series.

So where’s the problem with that? Hasn’t he earned his cheering crowds, you ask? Leave the poor boy alone. The problem is, of course, that he hasn’t, because it’s Destiny, and he’s The Prince. The hero’s victory is as inevitable as Superman’s, because Destiny railroads him to it. Oh, he’s probably had a tribulation or two on the way, and perhaps someone he quite liked even died, but Destiny will out, and in some of these books even the Dark Lord seems to know it, and faces his inexorable defeat with a kind of wretched world-weariness.

The current wave of fantasy authors doesn’t go for Destiny or, if they do, it’s to punch it between the eyes. There’s no destiny to be seen most of the time or, if there is, it turns out to be either manufactured or horribly fallible. See Tom Lloyd’s Stormcaller, where the Destiny plot gets well and truly kicked to touch (6), or Abercrombie’s First Law series, where the main protagonist is the sort of chap who would give last generation’s villains the shudders, and the Destined Hero has some rude awakenings coming his way fast. The heroes of these stories win out, where they win out at all, at cost, and through their own hard work. Nobody is spoonfeeding them the Dark Lord’s downfall, the magic sword broke and the girl doesn’t much like them. And, quite frequently, they’re no angels themselves, and the line drawn between them and the enemies they fight is scuffed and smudged. They have neither Superman’s effortless victories, nor his unassailable moral high ground.

(1) Why else d’you think the Martian Manhunter is green?

(2) Alan Moore could – see Watchmen.

(3) Outside my personal knowledge, but Lou Anders, my editor, also points out Brian Azarrello’s Lex Luthor: Man of Steel. It’s also worthwhile dragging in Marvel’s Squadron Supreme here, which is a fascinating shot across the bows of the competition as Marvel basically photocopies the Justice League, changes the names, and then sets out to show what would happen if they decided to take over the world, for its own good. The heartbreaking thing is, that in Squadron Supreme, they’re genuinely good guys, desperately trying to make everyone’s lives easier, and it’s all the more horrible when it goes so badly wrong.

(4) Yet. Always open to offers, although not, one imagines after this, from anyone looking for a new Superman story.

(5) Probably he’s also The Prince. It’s a weird old hold-over from the days of writers like Mallory, where every character of note was, if not a prince, then actually a king, and Arthur’s court was pretty much full not just of nobles but of actual royalty, all crammed around the same table. The royalist variant of the Destiny story assumes that only Princes get Destinies.

(6) Possibly. This is probably not the phrase I’m looking for, but sporting metaphors leave me baffled.