Babel Clash

It’s time again to say thank you to our current guests and introduce our next author.  Thank you, Paul & Danielle for your excellent posts (for your excellent books, as well!) and for making us consider what SF/F really is!  Any last posts before we turn it over to an author I’ve being reading avidly for quite some time now?

Guy Gavriel Kay will be joining us from China where he is touring for his latest book, Under Heaven.  Welcome, GGK!

Signing off on her last entry for this blog Danielle Trussoni asked: Can someone give me a list of qualities that mark a book as being science fiction and/or fantasy? I’ve been thinking about this question a good deal since discovering that The Left Hand Of God is a fantasy novel but perhaps a better way of framing the question is: what marks out a book as being realistic? If we say, for the sake of argument that the most fantastic novel ever written is The Lord Of The Rings (think of the invented languages and history that lie massively behind it) then what’s the most realistic book ever written? What is the benchmark work of truth in fiction from which all others deviate? In The Left Hand Of God the situation/characters are invented but otherwise it’s realistic. But this is true of all other works of realistic fiction or they wouldn’t be fictional. The claim for realism as the highest form of the novel comes from shame at the notion that all fiction is, by definition, made up. It’s all make-believe, it’s all play, it’s all rooted in the imagination, in the child’s sand-pit. The true origin of this debate is fear of the very nature of fiction itself.

Killer Titles

I finished the manuscript of the follow up to The Left Hand Of God the day after it was published in the US. While it had a working title (one nobody liked) I nearly always wait until I’ve finished a book before deciding on a name which seems a fair enough strategy. But is there such a thing as a killer title? It sounds as if it must be vital but after having written four novels and numerous screenplays I’m not so sure. As with naming children there’s a huge problem about being distinctive. You can’t really go wrong with calling a boy Duncan but call him Zowie and his name becomes the most significant thing about him.

Take the thriller Seven - its way of using a title that could mean anything is a commonplace one but in this case it has a clear answer to the question it raises: it’s the seven deadly sins. If you can imagine coming across the titles below knowing nothing about the books or authors what would you think of the following list?

Twilight (could mean anything). The Da Vinci Code (Code is good, but a renaissance artist - off-putting). The Godfather (spiritual protector?). Harry Potter and the… The Catcher In The Rye. A Series Of Unfortunate Events. Dune. The list could go on and on. These only seem great titles because they were mightily successful after publication. R L Stine’s Fear Street sounds like a killer title and it sold 80 million, surely proof of Killer Title status - on the other hand the even better title ‘Fear City’ is a film that failed utterly miserably even on video and despite every attempt at a commercial mix of sex and violence. The following is a list of the best selling US titles for 2007. No 1 and 7 are good but the others must fail the Killer Title Test. Removed from the context of the book itself the evidence is that the name is hardly relevant rather than the ultimate chance for success. Granted The Great Gatsby is a good title but it was nearly called Trimalchio, so I agree you can certainly have really off-putting titles. ‘Synecdoche, New York’ is a fascinating film but a title you can’t pronounce and nobody knows what it means? But the list below shows that bad titles are not much of a problem - again it’s the context. I don’t know how one could easily trawl through the 500 least best-selling novels of, say, 2007 but I bet there wouldn’t be much difference in the titles as an explanation for their lack of success: Plum Lovin’ sounds about as bad as it gets as a novel title, as does Playing for Pizza.
1. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hossein
2. Playing for Pizza by John Grisham
3. Double Cross by James Patterson
4. The Choice by Nicholas Sparks
5. Lean Mean Thirteen by Janet Evanovich
6. Plum Lovin’ by Janet Evanovich
7. Book of the Dead by Patricia Cornwell
8. The Quickie by James Patterson and Michael Ledwidge
9. The 6th Target by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro
10. The Darkest Evening of the Year by Dean Koontz

The Title for The Left Hand Of God came about after re-reading it in a wonderfully natural manner. Everybody I talked to liked it: ‘Killer Title’ they said. But now I’m about to re-read its successor and discover what to call it I can feel a hand on my shoulder of a different kind.

The basic problem with realism in fiction is that it doesn’t have what it takes to describe what’s real. Take the current taste for vampirism – what’s it about and why does it keep coming around and often in such strikingly popular way? Twilight is obviously huge but in the mid-seventies so was An Interview With The Vampire. Dracula is, I seem to remember, one of the most filmed books in history, and the origins of the novel provide a real glimpse into why this unreal metaphor has so much power and ability to describe something fundamental about our fear of other human beings. Bram Stoker was the manger of the great actor Henry Irving, a man of enormous and dominating charisma, who completely controlled Stoker’s life, both seeming to offer him enormous opportunities and yet to drain him of power over his own life. It’s not difficult to see how this strange but ‘real’ relationship could only be expressed in terms of its power and menace by being transformed into something strange that reflected the reality of how it felt not just how it looked.. When I started to write The Left Hand of God I began with the deliberate aim of mythologizing my own experience before the age of twenty in a quite conscious way (it’s not clear how aware Stoker was of the role of Irving in Dracula – it was a connection pointed out more by his son). Partly this was in recognition of the fact that my life was more ‘mythical’ than all but a few people born in the West in the second half of the 20th century. I was born in a house without running water or electricity by the light of a paraffin lamp. We got our water from a well in the garden. My first memory of my father was of him falling out of the sky. Not an early bout of schizophrenia but down to the fact that my father was one of the pioneers of free fall parachuting. I saw my first man killed when I was four years old when his parachute malfunctioned and I must have seen my father come close to death on half a dozen occasions. At the same time I was also being brought up as a Catholic by a series of pretty brutal nuns and priests. I was given my first beating at the age of seven for writing the number nine untidily by a nun dressed in the full 13th century drag of wimple and head to floor black. She not only looked like Darth Vader (surely an inspiration) she had his temperament. When I was ten I was sent to a Catholic boarding school run like a prison where I spent ten months of every year for seven years. Here we were further impressed with our innate sinfulness, thumped and generally harassed and told that angels were looking over our shoulder at what we were up to and recording it all for judgement day. Fifty miles away in London the Beatles and the Stones were discovering sex and drugs and rock and roll. We were living in the fourteenth century of hell, slivers of the true cross, the Immaculate Conception (if you don’t know, don’t ask) and the perfidy of all Protestants. How do you use realism to write about this mixture of alternate worlds? Which one of them was the more real? If you live in Afghanistan now you are living in the 13th century. If you live in a Baltimore project you live in one kind of 21st Century. If you live in a town house in Chelsea, you live in another. Again, which is the most real? And what kind of novel would reflect reality best? The Left Hand Of God is apparently a fantasy novel. Not to me, it isn’t. Do vampires exist? It depends on how you look at it. Slivers of the true cross anyone?

Today The Left Hand Of God is published in America. For some reason, a busy news day perhaps, neither Fox nor CNN have yet mentioned it.

Anyway, back to the question of reality.

Writers of so-called serious fiction shared one dominant characteristic – their fiction was first and foremost about themselves. The “self” lay at the heart of modernism, but now had a powerful rival, the everyday world, which was just as much a psychological construct.

JG Ballard on science fiction

Few would argue that John Updike was a great literary novelist. We feel we know this because everyone told us this was the case. Along with Bech, his most famous character was Harold ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom, a sort of typical American who had a revealingly typically American job devoid of any real significance or status at least by the standard of the literary novel: Rabbit owns a Toyota dealership. He is, of course, clumsy, a sexist, ineptly randy, and desperate. I think it’s fair to say the accepted view is that Updike’s brilliant prose redeems this lacklustre everyman: ‘A sense of doom regrows its claws around his heart: little prongs like those that hold fast a diamond solitaire’. Updike takes a hopeless case and by injecting himself into his creation takes this everyday nowhereman and lifts him to become worthy of treatment in a serious work of art. If there are any of you reading this who happen to own a Toyota dealership, I’d say I understand your concern at the assumption that you epitomise by definition all that is meaningless, drab, and trivial about the modern world however much the part of your heart not deadened by soap-opera values longs for a more authentic life. As it happens I used to know someone quite well who owned a Toyota dealership. He was, if anything, rather an oversensitive person convinced that his wife, who no longer liked him, had the strange ability to project her hostility into the food she prepared for him. “You can tell,” he used to say, “whether or not your food is prepared with love.”
I also own a Toyota, or rather I inherited one from my late Father. It’s a souped up version of the Corolla, is ten years old, and hence worthless, and is a miracle. After a decade everything on still works despite total neglect. It looks a couple of years old: despite being left outdoors and hardly ever having its oil changed it has never once failed to start. There is less rust on this car than on the Queen’s coronation crown. If it were a sword it would be Excalibur. As an example of wonderful value for money engineering according to standards of manufacture so high that the like has never existed in human history; it is a peerless example of honesty and virtue, a tribute to the basic decency and plain dealing that a seller should have for his buyer. Yet it is inconceivable that a literary writer or a serious literary critic could ever conceive of someone who sold such a modern marvel as anything other than a self-evident non-entity, a drudge selling trash to other drudges. Ballard’s objection to putting the ‘self’ at the heart of fiction points to the reason why so much literary fiction seems bland precisely because so much that’s going on in the world is regarded as self-evidently inferior in itself or as the product of inferior desires. Only the interior world has value, the rest is just getting stuff and spending. As Ballard points out, my Toyota is as much a psychological construction as it is one of metal, glass and plastic. I can’t say why Toyota has currently let itself down but a novel that traced how this company went from doing such an impressive job in the nineties to failing in the noughties would tell us a huge amount about what has changed in our views concerning honest workmanship and plain dealing – it would be a psychological novel with the potential to say a good deal more about what kind of creatures we are than anything Updike can tell us for all his great talent.

It came as something of a surprise to me when The Left Hand of God was published to discover I had written a fantasy novel and also that I had broken some of its fundamental rules in doing so. For the last fifteen years or so I had shared my life as a novelist with one as a screenwriter and made a fairly good living doing so, but the impossibility of seeing the script I’d written on the screen in anything like the form I’d written it drove me to stop and concentrate on writing more novels. This was the smartest decision I’ve ever made (screenwriting courses are to the last fifty years what snake oil was to the Old West, or mortgage based derivatives to Wall Street.) If you are determined to be a writer be a novelist – the money is as good or better, it’s your work between the covers, and unlike producers and directors, publishers don’t hate you as a matter of course. There’s only one drawback and that’s the extraordinary rigidity of critics and the reading public when it comes to categorising what kind of writer you are in a way that just doesn’t apply in movies. Directors, actors, and screenwriters can move across a huge range of genres and mix them up and no one finds this anything but healthy and interesting (see Stephen Soderbergh or the Coen brothers). But when it comes to the novel the kind of writer you are allowed to be is strikingly limited. If you are a literary novelist you can’t write a crime novel, and crime novels can’t be literary novels. If you write science fiction or fantasy you will never be reviewed or taken seriously unless you are, for some reason, Cormack McCarthy. Literary novelists who do write a book that should by any rational criteria be defined as science fiction will spend all their energy when promoting it trying to demonstrate that it isn’t really. It’s like being in the strictest of caste sytems where the merest taint of an inferior caste could be reputational death – for my money fantasy is probably the equivalent of the Indian untouchables. Until now in the UK I’ve been regarded as an obscure literary novelist on the basis of my two previous novels, The Wisdom of Crocodiles (part of it made into a mess of a film) in which I predicted the current financial crash and The Golden Age of Censorship, a black comedy based on my time in the UK equivalent of The MPAA. When The Left Hand of God was published here in January there was genuine shock that I could have let myself down so badly as to write a fantasy novel. What this had made me wonder is how these silly and precious distinctions come about in such a rigid way. They certainly don’t have any basis in the history of English literature and I’ll go on tomorrow to why I think the attempt to enforce these half-baked notions of purity are the single greatest threat to the future of the novel which in so many ways has the chance to become the most influential art form of the new century.

I remember the first time I went into Borders after Angelology was published. It was in San Francisco, and I was on my way to do a reading. When I asked where my book was shelved, the bookseller went to the science fiction section and pulled out the copies. That my book had been shelved in science fiction struck me as really odd–I hadn’t thought of Angelology as sci-fi. In fact, people have generally described it as an Umberto Ecco type historical religious thriller, or a Dan Brown-esque religious thriller, and I had found neither Umberto Ecco or Dan Brown in the science fiction section. Personally, I think of this book as a mixture of elements–historical fiction, supernatural fiction, adventure story, literary fiction.
So what makes Angelology–and other books like mine–fall into this category? That there is an element of the supernatural? What do you think–can someone give me a list of qualities that mark a book as being science fiction and/or fantasy?
I’d love to hear from you either on this blog or on Facebook!

After coming back from my book tour in March–when I was updating blogs, facebook, twitter and doing email and interviews by iphone and computer all day–I sat down to continue working on my new novel and realized that I was utterly hypnotized by the lights on my computer screen. It wasn’t only that I couldn’t focus on writing fiction–although that is part of it–but I had come to see my computer as a vehicle for this other kind of work, one that transports one into the public realm rather than creates a secluded private space for writing. After trying for some time to work on my computer, and having no results at all, I made the decision to remove all things electric from my office: computer, phone, lamps, alarm clock, radio, everything. I usually work in the morning, when there is a lot of light, but I put some candles on the desk, just in case. I found an old wind-up pocket watch to tell me how long I’ve been working. And I now write with a somewhat battered but very dependable Schaeffer fountain pen. Although this sounds like another case of someone going off the deep end and becoming a luddite, it isn’t the case with me. I leave my office and fly back into texting and updating twitter and all of the things I did before the change. But in my office there is nothing blinking, beeping, or flickering. I like to imagine that a 19th century writer would feel perfectly at home there, although the glass-topped work table I use for a desk might throw him off.

I wondered at first if removing all electricity from my writing process might alter the content. What if writing is like music—think of the difference of Nirvana in concert, with electric guitars screeching, and Nirvana’s quiet, melodic Mtv unplugged session. Will writing with a fountain pen make itself felt in my novel? Will my work become quiet and lightless? Will it change the length of pages I write a day? One result has been an abundance of doodling in the margins, the art of which has surely been lost in the computer age.
One thing is for sure: At the end of my day, I have ink stains all over my fingers.

The Buddhist thinker Shantideva once said that hell and all horrors were created by the mind; therefore, in all the worlds, the one thing one has to fear is the mind itself. Writing Angelology might have begun as an imaginary journey toward the dark side of what is sublimely beautiful—fallen angels and their offspring–but I soon found that the world I was creating as I sat alone at my computer felt as real as the war footage I saw on TV, or as real as the people I had met only virtually, or as real as people I knew in my childhood who have disappeared from my life. This may sound like solipsism, but in fact, creating a new reality is, for me, the most pleasurable part of writing. Angelology—like a lot of novels that use fantastical and supernatural characters—demands that the reader question the nature of fiction and reality.
Perhaps that is why it has been so rewarding for me to find that readers often want know where the ‘fake’ world of my book stops and the ‘real’ one begins. I was contacted by readers who claimed to talk to angels and know the secrets of the Nephilim. For them, the supernatural elements of my book were real enough. Not only were they certain that the Nephilim exist, they warned me not to divulge some of the more sensitive information about the celestial hierarchy. One person told me I should take care to guard the secrets of angelology; another wanted to share his secrets so that I could use them in my next book. For these people, the world of fantasy and reality is intricately linked. How similar, I wonder, is the process of creating characters and new worlds and writing them down? Is the imagination a membrane between ‘real’ and ‘unreal,’ a safe passageway between the two?

What are some of your favorite books that use actual ‘real world’ events (World War II or the Crusades, for example) and mix them with fiction to create a seamless new reality? What do you think is the author’s responsibility when using “real” historical events and people? Looking forward to your comments.

Thanks for reading.
Danielle

I’m really pleased to have been invited to blog on Babel Clash and am looking forward to spending the week writing about the various things that come up.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m the author of a memoir called “Falling Through the Earth” (not Sci-Fi unless you consider a Midwestern childhood to be in that category which, come to think of it, I do) and a novel called “Angelology,” which is one of those books that straddles many genres–historical fiction, fantasy, science fiction, supernatural, adventure.
Angelology posits that a passage in the Bible (Genesis 6) is reality. This particular passage refers to a group of angels called Watchers who were sent to earth to watch over humanity and, in a fit of desire, married human women and had children with them. Their offspring were called Nephilim, half human half angel hybrids that supposedly remained on the earth causing mayhem. In my book, Angelology–which is the theological study of angels–is the practice of studying and containing the Nephilim, and there is a group of Angelologists who do this very thing.

What began as an intellectual experiment of researching Angelology soon developed into obsession when I found, in the course of writing my book, that this group actually exists and that there are Angelologists out there now, studying the Nephilim.
If you’d like to learn more about this group, please visit their website:
www.angelologist.com

I’d love to hear what you think of them, as I find them utterly fascinating and somewhat bizarre in their single-minded pursuit of evil angels, so write some comments and let me know!

Oh, and before I sign off, if you’d like a signed bookplate to put in your copy of Angelology, please write to me at angelologist@gmail.com (with your name and mailing address) and I will send you one.

Until tomorrow!
Danielle