Babel Clash

Not sure I agree there – that gods can’t be used without creating overly significant flaws or rendering other characters useless. It’s a concern certainly, I remember reading a trilogy a few years back where the lead set of characters were near enough to immortal and powerful to make them effectively gods. They were flawed people but my issue with it was exactly something Joel predicted – rendering everyone else throughout history unimportant and the greatest of mortal heroes ended up simply hanging on their coat tails.

But was this an issue with the concept, or execution? Poor execution will ruin any good idea and I think that was the issue rather than a flawed concept. I disagree that gods/superheroes (while agreeing with Joel’s idea that the old ideas of pagan gods and innate desire for a personification of the world around us fuels the interest in superheroes) should be steered clear of. They can play a part in a world and add an important element for me, but the key in any ecosystem is balance and to have an internally consistent story, balance is just as important to a fantasy world. Without balance, no amount of good writing will make the reader believe what you’re on about and belief is what the fantasy writer needs every bit as much as gods do.

But hey, don’t take my word for it. There are more gods and daemons in the Twilight Reign than you can safely shake a stick at – and in the Grave Thief you’ll see them on an increasingly equal footing with the mortals, making deals and being manipulated, or worse. Go read it for yourself and form your own conclusions, then compare and contrast with Joel’s Trial of Blood and Steel.

My wife’s certainly suggested so in the past, through sniggers at one thing or another… But anyway, Joel’s issue with my kind of gods is the backstory and the mechanics of the world. I can certainly see his point, there’s a lot of work to be done there, but for me that simply adds an extra dimension to the world. I want to work out where the gods came from, the nature of spirits and daemons, the creation story etc etc – I want to fit all these elements together and construct a tapestry that both directly affects the characters and their actions, and creates a framework and context for it all.

The richness of a world’s history if vitally important for me, as are the folktales that act as the foundation of every day life. I’ve made some references to folktales I’ve not worked out fully, just certain comments designed to help the richness flower in the reader’s mind. It’s something that Susanna Clarke did beautifully in Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell – not to everyone’s tastes, but the little details and footnotes were what elevated the story for me and helped me ignore my concerns over the scale of power wielded my magicians. While I don’t go nearly so far I want the readers to be aware there is a world outside the story being told, that it’s not just window dressing for what I’m writing but there (and hopefully internally consistent) in its own right.

Joel’s comment about actually asking gods what they meant in scripture is a good one, but I think that depends on how patient one’s god is. Most of mine are squabbling brats with the attention span of a four year old and a similar tendency for tantrums. Ok, so they can think and act rationally, but especially when scripture/myth was recorded, they were younger and more aggressive so will have acted accordingly – there’s enough of an argument to be had over the contradictory actions and sayings to keep the most argumentative scholar happy, especially when the alternative is risking a good smiting for annoying the hell out of your god by pointing out the times they might have been wrong.

One additional plus to gods is the fact that they’re divine (stay with me here, I know some of you are think “the first rule of tautology club…”). Generally, I love working out a plot and fitting it into the world – that’s one of the fun parts of writing for me, but one really major annoyance with the medium I’ve chosen is how slowly people travel and communicate, travel in particular. My blood pressure increases every time I get an email from my editor saying ‘a horse can’t travel that distance in that time frame’ – she’s right; I know it, she knows it, and considering Joel’s comment right at the start of this, he’s bloody certain of it, but that doesn’t make it any less irritating.

Gods are one of the few entities that aren’t so constrained by physical limits; everyone else has got a three week boat trip plus a month on horseback. In a setting where there are a lot of constraints due to internal consistency, they’re an X-factor that can be a catalyst for something great or deus ex machine that ruins it for everyone.

In honour of ME we’re going to talk about gods – I like how that sounds. I have to agree with Joel on one (the one major) point about gods, namely that mortals must control their own fate.

To take a slight diversion, what’s bugged me about many novels, TV series and other things is the existence of prophecy – it’s a millstone about the neck of so much and unless you specifically have a plan for it, it’s a lazy excuse for not thinking a plot through. While it’s often not specified as to the origin of the prophecy they’re in the same boat as a divine, ineffable plan, so most of the time you just need to follow the script and the world will be saved.

Needless to say I’ve always found that very boring – they may both have their place in novels, but use them in the wrong way and it’ll backfire. Taking away the importance of actions and their consequences is most definitely the wrong way to go about fiction and the right way to leave your reader wondering why they bothered getting to the end.

Fantasy worlds tend to involve some sort of the supernatural and whatever part of the whole spectrum it involves, it allows for the possibility of beings beyond normal constraints. Now you don’t have to use them, but the more magic involved the more likely, to my mind anyway, there will be gods and monsters – it tends to be a form that involves power and the capacity for unlimited change so they’re a logical consequence and once you’ve got that, they’re characters with their own set of rules. The idea of an infallible, intangible and omnipresent god is a relatively recent one in human history (or at least throughout the majority I believe) and as a plot device sounds a pretty lazy one to me. And if you’re going to have them, they’re going to want to get involved in whatever’s going on.

Most importantly, they’re fun, or at least they can be! Being long-lived and more powerful than humans doesn’t mean they always do the right thing or fail to make mistakes – it just means the consequences of their actions are proportionately grand and destructive. Their potential impact on a world is not infinite and would most likely be far less than a GSU from a Culture novel – what you do with them is up to you but don’t ignore them. If a world has magic and gods, then factor them in, don’t just use them as window-dressing. Otherwise you run the risk of your creation lacking the depth and consistency it deserves.

Sexual politics may be part of the reticence to write overtly sexual characters but that isn’t the only reason a lot of male fantasy writers shy away from it in my opinion. First and foremost, it’s outside the comfort zone for them – on a basic level, the more you explore female traits and characteristics the easier it is to just get it wrong. That’s one reason why I’m so glad my principle editor is a woman; Lou’s great for bouncing ideas off but I’ve really seen the value of being aware Jo will give me a ‘friendly’ clout round the head if/when I get something wrong on the female characters.

So first we have the fact that it’s one more thing to learn, writing female characters, and the more you explore them the greater the chance female readers will disagree with your efforts. Secondly, the more sexuality we have, the more the book can be classified in someone’s head as something else. I walked into Waterstones today and say a display that said ‘Dark fantasy’ (as I went to rearrange the SFF shelves to make my books more prominent – don’t judge, we all do it!) but what they meant by dark fantasy was actually the romantic fantasy that increasingly is nothing more than erotica with window dressing. That in itself has a readership that often won’t be picking up Stormcaller or Sasha on the next shelf, because it’s only the veneer of fantasy that they want, nothing more.

Thirdly, sex scenes (a likely result of overt sexuality in a novel) in fantasy are often either trite, cliched and at least faintly ridiculous or, well, a bit too gritty and realistic. The one sex scene in Joe Abercombie’s First Law series stuck in the memory for the wrong reasons, as erotic as pigs rutting (if they rut, or is there another term?) and distracted from the rest of the book rather. Unless you make it look like a period drama with overblown romance, you run the risk of having a mix of sweat, mud and bodily fluids that comes across faintly disgusting and weird.

But having said all of that, the more you rounded and real a character, the better their influence on the whole novel. If they’re a sexual person, you can’t hide from that and you’ll embarrass yourself by doing so. Doranei, a major character in the Twilight Reign, only got to that position because a female character, Zhia, started flirting with him and derailed the scene – creating a whole extra plot thread that has hugely benefited the series and that would never have happened without Zhia being sexually aggressive. But with the rise of Twilight and other fantasy romance, are mainstream fantasy books free to do more on that front, or increasingly constrained in what they can show without being looked (even further) down upon?

I’d certainly agree there yes, that some women in fantasy do fulfil that role, and it does make me think that for one reason or another, there’s usually more purpose/consequence in putting a woman into a fantasy plot than a man, unconscious or not. Chuck another bloke in and half the time it doesn’t change the dynamic, make them a woman instead and she often becomes a plot catalyst as characters change how they react around her. It’s a role that requires far more care and thought from the writer than most I suspect, unless you’ve got a gender parity in the book anyway in which case the dynamic’s different. And perhaps that tells us something about the genders – a group of women will change behaviour with the introduction of a man to some degree, but I doubt it would be near the same extent as a group of men and one woman.

And of course, the point of tricksters in a novel tends to be to spark something off or introduce the change-around that takes matters in an unexpected direction and lift a scene from the mundane to the interesting. Most fantasies need something that takes them away from simply brute force winning out or the dark lord’s armies tend to win and make the book quite short. I’m not saying that’s always women at all, often it’s a man effectively saying to themselves: I have to do this another way, my default position just isn’t good enough (and the default position is often to run up screaming and chop someone off at the knees).

As Joel and a lot of writers explore a more equal balance in their novels, that ‘traditional’ role may well be changing (which is a good thing, just to be clear – the genre evolving can only ever be good) so what in the future will be the detail that changes the dynamic of a plot? Most likely unconsciously, how will writers change around this new set of mental guidelines?

I was going to post that I’m not a fan of frailty, or not to the degree Joel says he is, but thinking about my books that might not be so true. First and foremost I’m interested in power and its mechanics – what such a level of power can do to a person and their actions – but if you go below the surface frailty becomes crucial. Isak I can’t talk about because Ragged Man isn’t published yet, but even at the start of the series there is a note of frailty in his fears and unpreparedness.

A reoccurring theme of the Twilight Reign is me messing with my powerful characters, presumably because I’ve got the social development of a three year old. Many are frighteningly powerful and are capable of inflicting horrors on the rest of the world, but as a result this high station makes me immediately think about knocking them down. I’m playing with the vulnerabilities of gods, I’m breaking or torturing the superhumans – the more I think about it, the more I realise power comes with the price of being noticed by the kid with the God-complex and no morals.

Joel’s post made me think of a question to pose, to myself as much as him or the wider world – is there often a purpose for when a female character is used in fantasy fiction, rather than a male? Now I’m not drawing conclusions here, or even certain of the validity of my question, but especially with the idea of frailty being important to the dynamics of a novel and the place of women in most of these medieval societies, might it be that many of female characters are used specifically to counter-balance strength or highlight frailty in a situation?

If you read a history book, most of the figures mentioned are male, especially if you reduce that down to those who actively do something rather than get fought over like Helen of Troy. The course of history has rightly or wrongly been shaped by men and most fantasy writers conform to that model to some degree, for basic physiological reasons mostly. That in itself relegates women to a lesser position and most likely limits their numbers in the book – but do you think that makes them window dressing or individually more important than the men because of the extra dimension they add to situations?

And now, like the coward I am, I’ll leave that for Joel to answer…

Actually, call me that anyway, I like it. But anyways, on the subject of conforming to physical capabilities, I’ve been accused of being a bit of a hypocrite there. I like to think of it as having my cake and eat it however. It’s a fantasy world, so I should be allowed a bit of leeway, but at the same time the armies are made up of men for the same reason that they were in medieval times.

However, the main character and several others are a decidedly unrealistic size because of the whole magic thing – they’re over seven foot tall and 25-30 stones in weight. For a comparison, google the weigh-in photos between Nikolai Valuev and David Haye, then take the height of one and the muscle definition of the other (and then swap it around if you get a 6 foot bloke with a hairy belly).

But white-eyes are meant to be comic-book size, that’s kinda the point. I’ve got unsubtle, meddlesome gods, so their chosen representatives are not built for politics. What I was interested in was the result of putting those guys in charge – muscle-bound sociopaths with sky-high testosterone levels and the power of gods, finding themselves in a position where it’s all down to them. Isak’s been throwing in at the deep end and knows perfectly well his own basic instincts, so if he doesn’t learn to be more than the way he was made, a whole lot of people are going to suffer.

The character who’s divided most people is Legana, a beautiful assassin in Isak’s employ. Some people love her and her progression through the novels, some people think I’m submitting to clichéd fantasy tropes and stop reading. Now there’s not a lot I can do about people’s opinions, but like Joel’s Sasha, Legana is an Olympic athlete more than she’s a catwalk model. I don’t think it’s out of the realms of possibility that a system of temples training assassins their entire lives might have as their most marketable agent, one who’s also beautiful. Nowhere does it say she’s skinny like Cheryl Cole and I’m pretty sure if you taught Marion Jones to fight, she’d take down most men quite happily.

So how believable should a fantasy novel be? Does it even need to be? I guess that depends – it’s all made-up anyway. Whatever the reader is willing to believe makes a fantasy, and whether or not I agree with the fact Steven Erikson’s Malazan armies have women in the ranks, it works for him and it adds an interesting dynamic to the books. Consistency is important, but so is having a purpose with your writing – if you’re going to break the rules (of which consistency is an important one of any writing, genre or not) make sure you can justify it when someone asks!