Babel Clash

My publisher Lou Anders likes to talk about (for understandable reasons) how ‘Sasha’ and  ‘Petrodor’ have often been compared to George RR Martin’s ‘Song of Ice and Fire’.   So in my last post, I thought I’d talk about that.

I love Martin’s series.   What do our two series have in common?   Gritty realism, a prominence of strong characters, and very little magic (in my case, none).   Neither of us are very interested in cliched evil bad guys, which is not to say that they can’t work, but merely that the conflict between real, three dimensional people holds greater dramatic possibility.   One of the major conflicts in my series is between two good friends who become enemies.   Much more juicy.

Differences?   Martin’s series is more of a melodrama, a word I use in the best possible sense.   Plot direction is driven almost entirely by the machinations and desires of the characters.   Personality strengths and flaws are writ large across his work, dictating all kinds of twists and betrayals.   It’s going to make a great TV series on HBO, a lot of people who’ve never read fantasy, but do like a good melodrama, are going to be astonished at how much they love it.

I use melodrama too, as any dramatic writer does, but my background is political science, and my conflicts are collisions between the great forces of history — ethnicity, religion, philosophy of governance, the brute struggle for resources and power.   I won’t argue which approach yields better results, because they both have their strengths.   I will say though that some melodrama can meander, for lack of a driving central plot (Battlestar Galactica, anyone?).   Grounding my conflicts in the big historical forces means I always know where I’m going, whether the characters do or not.   That’s how I knew this series was going to be four books long, not forty.

I also don’t kill my main characters quite so readily as he does!   Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t happen, mind…

The biggest problem of putting Gods into a story, in my opinion, is that Gods tend to be very powerful, yet as every storyteller knows, the most dramatic characters have flaws.   Ask any one who watches ‘House’.   Flaws are interesting, and give the character something to struggle against, and viewers or readers something to empathise with.

So how flawed is too flawed?   I think House is a great character, but though I’ve seen it a few times, I don’t watch the show because a) I’m not much into the whole medical show thing, and b) at times I think the character overdoes it.   As characters go, House isn’t big on nuance, and I find his schtick at times just endless.

On the other hand, some characters aren’t flawed enough.   Let’s reference a more recent TV show (and yes, I am using TV in preference to books because let’s face it, there’s a far greater chance more readers will have seen a particular TV show than read a particular book) in Castle.   The lead character, Rick Castle, has obvious flaws — vanity, immaturity, etc, but done in a lovable way.   That’s the key to a good character flaw, they have to make the character if not more lovable (House is not always that) then at least more sympathetic (he does save peoples’ loves, so we forgive him).

Yet Castle’s opposite, Kate Beckett (the scrumptious Stana Katic) started the series too perfect, the beautiful homicide detective who is not only brilliant, but somehow the only woman in NYC resistant to Castle’s charms.   Her ‘perfect detective’ thing made her a little aloof and distant at first, and the writers have been busy adding lovable flaws to her character ever since — she’s a lot more insecure now, and her struggles to hide it and pretend otherwise are quite entertaining.   In short, vulnerability, which is so much more interesting in a strong character.   It’s also, as we discussed below, a problem more likely to be inflicted upon female characters than male, as the PC impulse often makes them too perfect, flawless, and thus boring.

When I wrote ‘Sasha’, I figured very early that her principle flaw was the same thing we see in a lot of top athletes — self absorption.   It’s a common trait amongst exceptionally talented people.   It doesn’t necessarily make them bad people, although it can.   But I didn’t want to overdo it, because again, good flaws make characters more lovable, not aggravating.

Here’s the key — in most people, their best qualities are also their worst.   Sasha is a powerful woman in a man’s world, she has no choice but to be driven, passionate and egotistical to some degree, or she simply could not fulfill that role.   These qualities are admirable, yet they can also be called flaws, because while she’s brave, loyal and entertainingly exuberant, she’s also hot tempered and sometimes short sighted — a real handful.   So it’s a balance.   The things that make her lovable also make her sometimes a pain in the neck.   And aren’t most people like that?

I’d steer away from gods in anything I wrote because to counter balance a power or perfection as intense as a god might wield, you’d have to create a flaw so big it’d either annoy everyone, or dominate every other character.

And yes, I did use the word ’scrumptious’.

There’s a different concept going on here with Roman and Greek style gods.   Those gods are an extension of the old pagan-style nature worship.   So a pagan culture might worship natural forces, like lightning, wind, the ocean, etc.   The role of these gods is to personify those forces, and to give each god a personality that symbolises the natural force that they represent — so Thor god of thunder is violent and temperamental, and Poseidon god of the ocean is, well, violent and temperamental…. see a pattern here?

Given that those natural forces can be destructive and compassionless, no wonder the gods have those personalities also.   So the concept of worship in those societies is very different to in ours — a pagan society sees itself surrounded by self-interested and selfish forces who need to be placated least they kill everyone for sheer spite.   Though probably the European Christian concept of god wasn’t so different five hundred years ago, and a lot of Christians still say he’ll burn you in hell forever if you don’t believe in him, which sounds pretty nasty and self important to me.

And I reckon we haven’t lost this love of wild and powerful forces, and the idea of heroes who are empowered by those forces.   These days we call them superheroes, and once a year people gather to worship them at ComicCon, and other such religious festivals.   Quite seriously, I think the pantheon of superheroes is the closest thing we still have to the old pagan god worship still around.   Maybe that’s why superhero movies are some of the highest-grossing movies in India, as the tales of Spiderman and company don’t seem so different to a lot of Indian viewers from tales of Hanuman and Ganesha.

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.

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…

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.

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’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.

I think the consistency thing is the most important. If your characters are going to transcend normal or ‘realistic’ physical boundaries, they should do so in a way that’s consistent with the rest of your world. Now occasionally you get even great writers violating this, like in one very ‘gritty realism’ fantasy that I love, where the prince is chained in a dungeon for months with little food, but still whips everyone’s butt with a sword as soon as he escapes. If he were a magical being, in a magic or ‘unrealism’ intensive world, then sure, it might be believable. In a ‘gritty realism’ world filled with human frailty, less so, because sword fighting is physically demanding. I’m a cyclist, and I can feel myself getting weaker if I just miss a few days of cycling. After a few months chained in a dungeon, I’d be struggling to walk, let alone cycle. And the sword fighting prince would have been struggling to beat a ten year old.

So as a dramatist, I actually like frailty, because frailty can be dramatic, especially when you inflict it upon someone who’s not used to it. Which means also that I’m a firm believer in not making any character too powerful. I’ve never been particularly into superheroes, but I can at least appreciate the likes of Batman and Spiderman because they have flaws and weaknesses, which in turn gives them drama. But Superman on the other hand is just dull, because he’s so damn perfect. The best drama comes from internal struggle, characters battling against their own flaws and weaknesses, and when your character doesn’t have any, he or she will be unavoidably boring.

Now back to the male-female thing, Tom says his female fighter Legana is an assassin. Which for me absolutely works whether your fantasy world is ‘realistic’ or ‘unrealistic’. In ‘A Trial of Blood and Steel’, which definitely falls into the former category, Sasha’s swordsmanship is all about speed and technique, and the martial arts concept that some superior techniques can neutralise superior size and power. So she’s not too different from an assassin in that sense, relying upon speed, agility and cleverness. What she can’t do is weigh herself down with armour and fight in a mass combat shield line with the men, because there she loses all her agility and technique, and has to rely on size and power instead… of which she is lacking. She could certainly beat up most normal men (guys reading this blog, or writing it!) but against men who seriously train to fight, she’s just outmuscled, the same way Marion Jones could outsprint most guys, but not other top-level male sprinters.

But same concept in the real world, some fighting women do awesomely, some less so. Soviet female snipers did huge damage to the Nazis in WW2, but you wouldn’t have put them in the boxing ring against the guys. The point of having a sniper rifle is they didn’t need to. Today women fly fighter planes every bit as well as male pilots, because strength is irrelevant. And in related activity, at this very moment, there’s a 16 year old girl named Elena Myers making one of the youngest ever debuts in American professional motorcycle racing (AMA Supersport, isn’t the internet wonderful for finding out this stuff?). Which is one of those many things I think women would be great at, but have been socially precluded from for the last hundred years. So in comparing men against women, it depends on the activity. (And don’t get me started on how women’s ski jumping was banned from the Olympics!)

So the Olympics are just finished, and we’re writing about what our heroic fantasy characters are actually capable of, physically speaking. Because your average fantasy hero has to do a lot of very demanding and athletic stuff, and some of it’s not very realistically portrayed.

Does it matter? I guess it depends on what kind of fantasy novel you think you’re writing. You could just take the comic book superhero approach, and say, ‘well, my character can do all this far out stuff because I say so’, meaning that these abilities are all pretty much magical, and whether they’re actually realistic or not is irrelevant.

Myself, I like my characters to struggle. I mean, if all your abilities come from some magic sword, or magic spell, or magic whatever, it means the character hasn’t had to work for it. In ‘A Trial of Blood and Steel’, my lead character Sasha is an athlete, because she has to be. She has insane natural talent, sure, but insane natural talent doesn’t matter if you don’t practise, and stay in shape. When Sasha goes on a long journey, she takes time to get off her horse and run for a bit, because sitting in a saddle all day might make you ache, but it doesn’t keep you fit. She practises every day, has a regular routine of exercises, and is more fanatical about it than an Olympic athlete because Olympians are only training to win, while she’s fighting to live. All that hard work shapes her character and makes her what she is. If it were all just given to her on a silver plate, she wouldn’t be so interesting.

It also raises the question of women versus men, and no question, in fantasy-style fighting, most women would struggle. I get around it by creating a specific style of martial art called ‘svaalverd’, which is the sword work equivalent of Wing Chun kung fu, and allows a woman to neutralise power and strength with superior technique. But I don’t like just skipping over the fact that most women aren’t as strong, which some fantasies certainly do… in fact, I like that edge it gives to Sasha’s abilities. If some big guy annoys her she can’t just whack him, she’s not strong enough. With her, it’s swords or nothing, so don’t make her mad because while she’s not capable of hurting a big guy, she’s very capable of killing him.

And speaking of realistic athleticism in fantasy, don’t get me started on horses! You can’t run a horse all day and expect him to live. Unless his name’s Shadowfax, anyhow. Horses can be very fragile, and if you push them too hard they’ll fall over and die.

But then, how realistic do you like your fantasy? I like mine very realistic, obviously, but then again, I can’t complain about Shadowfax because he fits perfectly into the world of Middle Earth. So I guess what really matters is consistency — don’t make some characters superhuman while others are unable to escape their mundanity, and don’t complain that it’s physically unrealistic for women to fight with swords if they live in a world where horses can run for 24 hours without a drink.