Babel Clash

I pondered this question all weekend. What lessons could Midwinter teach aspiring writers? The self-flagellating artist in me immediately responds, “Nothing. It’s a mediocre book at best; derivative, not descriptive enough, goes off on a far-too-wide tangent about 2/3 through. If aspiring writers were to learn anything from it, it would only be from the massive pile of mistakes I made in it.”

Midwinter can definitely teach you that a beautiful Chris McGrath cover is something that's nice to have.

Of course, this is hyperbole. Sure there are things I could have done better, but all in all, I think Midwinter works just fine. Great literature? Probably not. A solid fantasy read? Sure. Certainly a journeyman first novel. Even downright clever in places.

Maybe this is what it can teach you. Unless you are one of those supremely confident individuals who never second-guesses him/herself, and also happens to be brilliant, you are very likely to have misgivings about any story you embark upon. The bigger the story, the more moving parts, the more trepidation you are likely to experience. You will probably spend some time in the midst of writing it (somewhere just past the halfway point seems to be my personal favorite spot) thinking that it is the worst novel ever written, and any smart person would abandon it now. Other days (maybe the next day), you might find yourself thinking that you are a genius who can do no wrong. (continue reading…)

Reading Bill Willingham’s post from a couple days ago, I was reminded of some of my own thoughts about the act of reading. Bill talks about the collaboration between the writer and the reader, and how the reader actually does most of the heavy lifting in that process. I agree, but I might put it in slightly different terms.

When we think of the performing arts, we think of dance, music, theater, that kind of stuff. I don’t know too many people who would place “reading” on that list. But if you think about it, reading is a performance just like any of those. In any performing art, the performer takes a composition (choreography, a musical score, a script) and brings the composition to life by performing it (a ballet, a symphony, a play). As far as I can tell, reading is just like any of those things: the only difference is that the performance typically only happens in the reader’s mind (or at bedtime, when I read books to my kids). (continue reading…)

I think that we are living in a Golden Age of popular culture.

At least, for the me and the other members of my generation, we are. I imagine that older generations must think us insane. All of the things that allured us as children, the onslaught of trash culture and science fiction and fantasy and horror have all come home to roost in the current generation of writers; the obsessive quirks of very smart people reeling in a torrent of inputs both sublime and ridiculous, sacred and profane. And now the ones who were raised on all that stuff–everything from H.R. Puff-n-Stuff to Stanley Kubrick to Kurt Vonnegut to Spielberg to Star Wars to Star Trek:whatever to Conan the Barbarian to Raiders of the Lost Ark–are now the ones producing it. We grew up imbibing the distiled essence of twentieth-century pop culture, created by people who themselves had been nursed on Burroughs and Lovecraft and Poe and Superman comics and Tex Avery and Universal monster movies. The things that our generation has assembled as a result are the purest distillation yet, managing to cram a pressure-cooker of allusive play and substance together in a bright mishmash that defies tradition and genre while embracing and celebrating it at the same time. (continue reading…)

Over at SF Signal, there’s a “Mind Meld” discussion about the perennial bugaboo of “mainstream approval” for literary science fiction and fantasy. Does literary genre fiction have the respect of the mainstream? Does it need such respect?

The predominant response seems to be “no.” And whenever this topic comes up, the response invariably seems to be “no.” No, we don’t need it, don’t care, doesn’t matter, and here’s a list of a thousand reasons why (my favorite of all the responses is Gene Wolfe’s, who sums it up more eloquently than I could). I can’t think of an instance where a genre writer has responded, “I sure do crave the respect and admiration of the mainstream! Without such respect, all is for nought!”

So why do we keep asking the question? (continue reading…)

Pyr Books editor Lou Anders pointed out to me that one thing James and I have in common is our tendency to ground our fantasy worlds in the real world through a series of “nebulous connections.” I think that’s a fair assessment, certainly for me, and definitely in Midwinter.

Something I try to do with my fantasy writing, with varying degrees of success, is to make the settings as “realistic” as possible. This does two important things: it helps the reader buy into the world, by showing them things that they already know to be real; and it allows for a bit of narrative shorthand: you don’t have to describe things that the reader’s already familiar with as thoroughly, thus ameliorating the inevitable bogging-down of fantasy literature with endless descriptions of made-up things.

There are two variations on the theme that writers have gotten the most mileage out of. There’s the human transported into the fantasy world, of which there are so many examples it seems pointless to name any, and the background influence of the real world in the fantasy world itself. (continue reading…)

Robert Heinlein’s fiction is nothing if not didactic. Willingham got me thinking about Heinlein with his recent post about the practical versus the romantic, and that got me thinking about what a know-it-all Heinlein was, and how much I love him in spite of it.

Bill Willingham loves to needle me that I’m actually a closet Republican, despite my vocal liberal views, because Starship Troopers is one of my favorite books. It’s true that despite being a fine science fiction novel, it is nonetheless a conservative apologia on the level of Atlas Shrugged. Heinlein was the guy who gave us, in The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, a libertarian paradise on the moon in which the only law enforcement was consensus: if we don’t like your looks, we toss you out the airlock. He proposed in Starship Troopers that citizenship should only be offered to those who were able to prove that they deserved it, through military service. Everywhere you look in Heinlein there’s the spirit of extreme personal liberty, a chuckle at the notion of social policies, and a shrug at the less fortunate (Heinlein would probably have argued that there’s no such thing as the less fortunate, since anyone ought to be able to pull himself up by his bootstraps, and if he won’t then he doesn’t deserve liberty in the first place).

(continue reading…)

Leaving aside the wrong-headedness of my peers for a time on this whole mash-up business, though both Enge and Chris Roberson (in the comments to Enge’s post) raise some pseudo-convincing arguments), I’d like to move on and talk about the monsters that are so prevalent in today’s mashups (zombies and vampires) and the monsters that have currently fallen by the wayside.

Boris Karloff in The Mummy

It’s not a new idea that our monsters are metaphors for our collective fears. Giant mutated ants and Godzilla were the fears of a population addled by the Atomic Age. Frankenstein was a stand-in for the Victorian discomfort with science’s potential overthrow of religion. What’s interesting today is how we have addressed our new fears not by creating new monsters, but by re-inventing the existing ones. And that’s left a few of them stranded in the past. (continue reading…)

This talk about genres reminds me of a current persistent trend in genre fiction of which I am growing painfully weary. It’s certain to irritate some of my writers friends when I bring it up, so I hope some of them will jump up attempt to tell me how wrong I am.

Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life, by Philp José Farmer.

I’m speaking of what I’ll call “mashup fiction.” The This sort of thing has been around for some time, but in the last few years there’s been a flowering of it in comics, fiction and cinema and I am frankly sick of it. By “mashup fiction” I mean stories whose genesis is the intentional combination of unrelated tropes, historical figures, or characters from previously published works. What some call “crossover fiction” I’ll relegate to a subcategory of this.

(continue reading…)

Thinking back over influences got me thinking about how the things we like don’t just influence our style; they also influence how we define what it is that we do and what its place in the overall culture is.

I don’t think there’s been any greater influence on my writing that Frank Herbert’s Dune novels. I love every single one of them and make a point of re-reading them every few years. They never fail to entertain and inspire me, and like all the best literature, I find new things to love about them with every subsequent run at them.

First mass-market paperback cover, which is the one I always look for in used bookstores

One of the really fascinating things about these books, especially Dune itself, is that it is an unapologetic blend of sf and fantasy. To be honest, I find the hard-sf bits the least interesting parts of the book, but there’s no denying that Dune is, in many ways, a hard-sf novel. All of the ecological details, the stillsuits, the water conservation, etc. are hardcore futurism. But they’re set in this beautiful, byzantine, deeply fantasy-inflected world, with a magical spice whose economics dictate the politics of the Universe, a cult of telepathic witches, precognitive human monsters who navigate hyperspace, and the Kwizatz Haderach himself, Paul Atreides, who is as Campbellian a hero as any to be found in literature.

What’s interesting to me is that in many ways, Dune is consciously anti-sfnal in its approach to some things. Herbert goes out of his way to rid his world of computers and artificial intelligence. At almost every turn he eschews the trappings of sf, opting for the baroque, the poetic, and the metaphorical. In fact, the characters who most embody technological progress, the Harkonnens, are portrayed as vicious and degenerate, rats in a sprawl of anti-human advanced technology. (The Ixians take on this role in a more measured capacity in the later novels, but they remain distant and amoral, never seeming particularly human.)

Even the stillsuit, which is probably Herbert’s clever idea, is ambiguous as technology. It’s craftsmanship; it’s not a device but a contraption, powered totally by its human wearer, a second skin that enhances the human rather than dehumanizing. In Dune, the “good” technology is always projected inward, blending with the personal.

Not having read these books when they came out, I’m not sure what Herbert’s mindset was when he wrote the book, how much of a reaction they are to the sf New Wave, about which I don’t claim to be an expert. The point is that I think you could make a case that Dune is as much a fantasy novel as it is an sf novel. God Emperor of Dune is indistinguishable from a fantasy novel. Taken on its own, there’s very little to imply that it’s anything else. And the last two books are pure space opera.

But regardless of the vast divergence in approach among the books of the series (and I’m starting to get to the point now), they come together to form what is (to me) a unified whole. So I ask the question: what kind of fiction is the Dune series? Is it Fantasy? High fantasy? Epic Fantasy? Is it sf? hard sf? Space Opera? Futurist?

The reason I bring this up is a roundabout way of getting at my proclamation that the labels we put on genre fiction are arbitrary, and the more strictly we try to define them, the less useful they become. I read an article yesterday in which the author claimed the Star Trek isn’t “real” sf because it doesn’t meet his definition of what sf is: an extrapolation of technology to create a conflict that sheds light on human nature, or human folly, or the world we live in, or whatever sundry things that sf can shed light on. Now, I agree that what he calls sf is certainly sf. But it isn’t, to me anyway, everything that sf can or should be, and the notion that it should be anything seems sadly limiting and self-defeating.

Dune is not the story of planetary ecology. It isn’t the story of interplanetary economics, or drug addiction, or magical witches. It’s the story of Paul Atreides, and how he progresses from young aristocrat to benevolent tyrant of the galaxy, and the enlightenment that he experiences along the way. Everything else that happens in the book, everything piece of set dressing and sfnal or fantasy trope contributes to the psychology and emotional makeup of Paul Atreides. Essentially, Herbert reached into his imagination and pulled out everything he could possibly imagine to make a compelling setting that would inform the ultimate concern of his protagonist, which is the progression from a self-focused ego driven individuality, to a holistically-focused, moral being who is the emblem of a massive, total human consciousness. (Whaddya want? It was the seventies.)

But if Herbert had espoused a strict definition of “what science fiction is,” he wouldn’t have allowed himself to create the Bene Gesserit, or the Spacing Guild, or the spice malange itself, or any of a zillion other things for which there’s no sound scientific basis. What a losst that would have been!

That’s probably why I’ve always been so leery and contrary whenever I hear people trying to define sf or fantasy or horror, or this or that subgenre. I realize that there are marketing concerns that dictate how books are bought and sold, and that’s whole separate kettle of fish, and probably worthy of another post, or a month’s worth of them. Here, I’m only talking about how we as community define what we do. And in short, my credo is this: labels and categories are merely pointers, circles in the great Venn diagram of imagination. If you try to make them anything more than that, if you try to make those circles into proscriptive boundaries, all you’re doing is shooting yourself in the foot.

(James, I’ll address the whole day-job question in a separate post later on!)

Influences certainly seem a good place to start. I read all of Lord of the Rings during a long dull summer in college. (It seems like college is the time to read the thing.) I remember finding it somewhat ponderous and vaguely annoying; it was good, but I wished Tolkien would get to the damn point already. If there was one thing I felt like I had to “correct” in my own fantasy series, it was the seeming inability of high-fantasy authors to get to the damn point already. (Robert Jordan, I’m lookin’ at you, pal. I’ve really enjoyed the Wheel of Time books, but if I have to read one more description of a woman’s bodice in these last books, there will be a reckoning.)

Despite all that annoyed me about Tolkien, I was still mightily attracted to the stunningly realized world that he’d created. You just knew that any question at all you might have about Middle Earth, Tolkien would have an answer for it. Who was the Elf-King eleventy-six years ago? Not only did Tolkien know, but he probably had eighty pages of notes on the guy. Just in case.

That said, I was already a high-fantasy addict, and Tolkien was required reading. Don’t get me wrong; I enjoyed him, but it wasn’t then and never has been my favorite fantasy series. And by “high fantasy” I simply mean Tolkienesque fantasy replete with swords and wizards, dripping with moss and a sense of the ancient, larger than life conflicts, etc.; I play fast and loose with such labels.

This is the cover image for the editon I had as a kid.

The series that actually hooked me into high fantasy was Ursula K. LeGuin’s Earthsea trilogy (which is now like a quintology or pentology, or whatever you call five books). Looking back, LeGuin owes an enormous debt to Tolkien, as does anyone who today writes in that vein, but I didn’t know that when I was twelve years old, and the World of Earthsea was plenty complete for my tastes. It had maps and everything! In comparing the two series in my mind, it feels like LeGuin got just as much actual story in those three books as Tolkien got in his, without the digressions of what Tom Bombadil had for breakfast, or the pages upon pages of Elvish poetry (in my memory, LoTR is about sixty percent Elvish poetry).

A few readers of my novel Midwinter complained that for high fantasy it was pretty scant on the small details, and while I can understand the objection, that was very much on purpose. Not being quite as talented at LeGuin, I did my best to cut out the chaff of that book and stick to the point, while at the same time trying to get the feel of high fantasy. And yet, and yet, Tolkien was lurking in the back of my mind; there’s a passing reference to a place called “Beleriand,” which was a name I thought I’d come up with my own, though Tolkien mavens will recognize it as a place in Middle Earth, a fact which, sadly, was pointed out to me only after the novel was published. Some insidious desire remained in me, the subtle need to add breadth and depth to this world, even while I was trying to avoid getting bogged down in it. There’s a balance there, and it’s one that I’m trying to address in Midwinter’s sequel, The Office of Shadow. We’ll see how that one goes.

Now, about the elves.

In my writing, I more or less chose the direct opposite tack of Mr. Enge and went full-elf with my debut novel, though, oddly, for similar reasons as those that compelled him to eschew them. My complaint about the elves in LoTR was that they had no personality whatsoever. They were, with the notable exception of Arwyn, interchangeable (though Wikipedia informs me that she’s only half-elf, which, there you go). I think Tolkien’s deference to them may have been an unconscious knee-jerk response of an Englishman to nobility, even while his portrayal of them seems somehow underscored with a kind of contempt. He calls them “good” but, as James has pointed out, they’re really kind of stuck up and bristly and show a surprising lack of concern about the plight of Middle Earth. Maybe they simply thought of Middle Earth as a rental car, and just couldn’t be bothered, since they were about to return it.

Anyway, there were things about the elves (both in Tolkien and elsewhere) that deeply affected me regardless. Their beauty and grace, their deep sense of history, the sheer wondrousness of them. I wanted to know more about these people, and so when I wrote Midwinter, I set it in Faerie, and made everyone there an elf. But I set out to immediately undermine the preconception of what an Elf was. The very first character we meet in the novel is described as “huge and crazy,” “with ugly teeth.” Another early character is described as “barrel chested,” and isn’t particularly bright. My hope is that the reader will unconsciously think, “My, these elves are nothing like other elves I’ve read about. I must know more about them!” (My readers are all Victorian gentlemen, apparently.)

There’s a scene in The Fountainhead where the architect Howard Roark is talking about influences. He opines that the works of those that have come before you are building blocks, and that our proper approach to them is to build things out of them. To speak of an original fantasy story is almost a contradiction in terms. Fantasy is almost always a repurposing of elements from folklore and mythology. The elves are there; we should use them, celebrate them even, but always with an eye to saying something new, using them as a platform upon which we can build to give our own perspective on what is and what might be.

Interestingly, James, we’ve both written about Tolkien not just as an influence, but also as a counter-influence; a template for how we didn’t want to do things. Interesting, no? I wonder if our distastes are as important (if not more so) than our tastes?