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.

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…

Batman IS NOT magic.  Batman IS fantasy, however.

Lee & I seem to be working with two very different definitions of magic.  In Lee’s definition, magic is synonymous with fantasy and the words can be used interchangeably.  This definition leads inexorably to the conclusion that Batman is magic because a) superheroes are magic and b) Batman is a superhero, therefore c) Batman is magic.  But, in my humble opinion, it is a sweeping generalisation to assume that all superheroes are magic.

In my definition, magic is a subset of fantasy.  To use the language of deductive reasoning, all magic is fantasy, but not all fantasy is magic.  I’m not disputing the fact that Batman is fantastic.  Batman is wicked fantastic.  Some of the stuff he can do is pretty darn unlikely.  But the fact remains that it is unlikely, not impossible.  Yes, it is very, very unlikely that one person could be the best at everything - detecting, disguising, super-sciencing, athleticism, you name it - but it is not impossible.  Yes, it would be bizarre for “real” people to run around dressed like bats, but it is not impossible.  Yes, it is unusual for real people to keep a Rogues’ Gallery, but Allan Pinkerton did and he was a real dude.  If it’s at all possible, no matter what the odds are against or how unlikely or remote, in my definition, it is fantasy not magic. 

Magic is the impossible.  It’s controlling wind (like Shannon Hale’s Goose Girl and Patrick Rothfuss’ Name of the Wind), it’s the ability to fly/levitate (like Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn), it’s shooting bolts of fire (like Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files).  It’s the stuff that us mere mortals constrained by the laws of physics just couldn’t possibly do.

In conclusion, I would like to offer this Venn diagram as irrefutable proof that Batman, while he is fantasy, is most decidedly not magic.

You’re absolutely right, Lee.  It’s not that I don’t like magic in my stories.  I just don’t like ill-defined magic.  I rebel against the use of magic as deus ex machina, but at the same time, I dislike book that provide a litany of rules and regulations regarding the uses of magic.  I want something that strikes a balance between magical free-for-all and plot-stopping thirty thousand commandments  governing the capabilities of and uses for magic in any particular world.  I don’t need to know that Superman can’t peel a cellophane S off his chest (because in my world he can’t.  Period.) unless it’s critical to the plot.  As a reader, I want to be able to assume that if you’re telling me magic can’t raise people from the dead, it’s because it has bearing on the plot somewhere down the line.  And if it doesn’t, I’m gonna be frustrated.

What I want is a book that convinces me that, while the author may not see the need to give out every detail & bit of minutiae about the rules governing magic, she or he knows what they are & is committed to playing by them.

There are two things I have to disagree with, though.  1) Batman is not magic.  I think Sheldon put it quite admirably.  The Green Lantern is magic.  Batman is a deep voice, a fortune that could rival Bill Gates’, and a crap ton of training.  Don’t get me wrong, I love the Dark Knight, but he’s not magic.  2) VCRs are totally obsolete.

As sort of an aside and since Lee brought up weird things going on with the magic of Superman . . . Does anyone out there watch Smallville?  Can someone explain to me what on earth wish-fulfilling kryptonite is?

Thanks, Tom & Joel for contributing to Babel Clash!  Please take this opportunity with your last couple of posts to share any information you’d like regarding The Grave Thief and Petrodor.  Or to just get the last word in on gods and their uses . . .

And for all you readers, tune in tomorrow for the beginning of our next conversation with A. Lee Martinez.

Naomi and Claudia, we still have a day or so to wrap up.  Thank you for the conversation.  It’s been fun.  Before you go, please share a little bit about your latest book or project.

Also, what would you say to those readers who’ve not read your work before?  What can they expect from your stories?

Professor Moriarty

How quickly you’ve unveiled my master plan.  Little did you know that “Morgan” was a carefully crafted moniker to hide my true identity, that of Professor Moriarty, Sherlock Holmses’ arch-nemesis.  OK, I’ll cut the megalomaniacal laughter now.

Have you written any comic book anthologies?  I was very tempted to ask who’s the greatest of detectives, Sherlock Holmes or Batman?

So tell me more about these anthologies.  You assemble quite the rogue’s gallery for each one.  How do you pull together such a notable gang of contributors?

Welcome to John Joseph Adams.

In honor of his anthology, the Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and the new Holmes film opening Christmas Day, Babel Clash asks the hard questions.  We’ll begin with a real puzzler:  “Who’s smarter, Sherlock Holmes or Gandalf?”

World War Z - best zombie novel ever!

When zombies are so prevalent that they’ve even invaded Pride & Prejudice, you know that the Zombie Apocalypse has come.  One publisher, Permuted Press, specializes almost exclusively in zombie fiction, and I’m even hearing truly frightening rumors about zombies in the romance section.  That’s just plain creepy.  So, when picking a favorite tale of the zombie conquest, you have options.

My # 1 favorite zombie story is World War Z by Max Brooks.  With a sweeping and epic vision of a worldwide war, it focuses on the wildness and adventure of the situation without delving too deeply into the blood and gore.  Not to say that there isn’t a little blood and gore here and there.  WWZ cranks along at a rocket ship pace, and it’s one read that is pure fun.  If zombies do conquer the planet, then we can only hope that they do so with this much style.

Mike Carey's take on the X-Men

We’re talking about genre hopping, but we also have medium or format hopping.  We have authors such as Mike Carey and Dan Abnett writing comics.  Jim Butcher wrote a Dresden Files comic.  Neil Gaiman is writing screenplays.  George R. R. Martin’s Game of Thrones and Charlaine Harris’ True Blood are connected to HBO.

Bill Willingham, a highly regarded comics writer, recently took his stab at writing comics.  So comics writers are coming over to the traditional book format, too.

Dan, Paul and Jeff, have you ever had an itch to write comics?  If you had the chance, would you adapt your own work, work with an estished brand name or try something totally different?  If not, is there another medium in which you’d like to tell your tales?  Would you tackle a screenplay for your own books?