Review: Lamentation by Ken Scholes

Lamentation is a marvelous book that strikes a careful balance between the imaginative inventions of a distant future and the emotional depth of its main characters.

The events of the story are triggered by the awful destruction of the legendary city Windwir, which held the collected knowledge of lost ages under the auspices of the Androfrancine Order. The city was annihilated by the use of long-lost and forbidden magic, magic that was no doubt recovered as a result of the Androfrancine's own holy quest for knowledge in the ruins of the world long destroyed.

Precisely how Windwir was destroyed is revealed in short order. Why it was destroyed is a question that takes much longer to answer. And the impact of its destruction upon the lives of the main characters and the course of nations is the story whose first portion the book tells.

Scholes takes an interesting approach with his narrative. Each chapter presents us with several short sections a few pages in length, each offering the point of view of a different character. Most of these characters have their stories followed throughout the narrative. I found that this allowed Scholes to follow a number of storylines as they wove in and out of each other, intersecting and separating at different points.

Normally that sort of storytelling approach can leave me somewhat lost in the overall narrative or frustrated when the author jumps away from an interesting storyline into one I don't care about. Scholes avoids this by keeping each of the sections very succinct yet informative.

As a result, once you leave one character's storyline and touch upon the stories of three others, say, you haven't forgotten what you left behind when you return to that original character.

Moreover, I found that I liked all of the primary point of view characters that Scholes introduces.

These characters include: Petronus, the Hidden Pope; Rudolfo, the Lord of the Ninefold Forest Houses; Jin Li Tam, daughter of the mighty Tam banking family and an adept spy; and Nebios, the last (human survivor) of the destruction of Windwir. Another character, the mechanical man Isaak, does not get his own point of view sections in the book but really comes to life through his interactions with the main characters. Like Guy Gavriel Kay's work, this book is filled with clever people struggling to understand and outwit each other. There are also some moments of romance and love that are genuinely touching.

The setting is also interesting, a mixture of mostly well-understood magic (more akin to alchemy than traditional spellcasting), recovered technological artifacts, and high-Renaissance technology. Scholes pulls a clever trick here, in my view. The first few chapters bombard the reader with unusual images: birds carrying messages via carefully knotted cords dangling from their legs, mechanical men, soldiers treated with magical powders that make them both invisible and superhumanly fast, and so forth. But then these unsual creations are explained and expanded upon gradually over the course of the novel, while only a few new bits are introduced, so that by the end they have become facts of the world with which the reader is comfortable.

Compared to something like John C. Wright's work, which hurls out Big Ideas every couple pages at a breakneck pace, Scholes's work here is calmer. Instead of adding on new supernatural or supertech concepts, he expands upon the societies and major players in his future world.

There are clearly a lot more Big Ideas and Wondrous Things lurking around in the setting, waiting to be uncovered. But like an archeologist digging through a delicate past, Scholes shows patience and restraint in revealing their details over time.

What I Want/Don't Want in Science Fiction and Fantasy

I've been thinking about this topic over the past few months as I've read a lot of different books and short stories in the two genres, written by a wide range of authors.

I've noticed some trends in the types of stories that I've been reading. Note that these aren't necessarily trends among authors. A talented or experienced author might try his or her hand at writing in several of the styles noted below, though I think the hackneyed style appeals mainly to people who are writing serial novels for licensed properties or else are content to rest upon their reputation for a bit and crank out some predictable books for the money.

There are two styles that I don't like in fantasy or science fiction novels. I won't bother to finish a book that clearly falls into either one of these categories. I might finish a short story or watch a film that indulges in them.

Hackneyed
These books are distinguished by two main traits: they don't work hard at all to maintain internal consistency and they don't respect the intelligence of the reader.

By internal consistency, I mean that the authors typically posit some form of magic or technology in the setting that would have much, much broader effects on the society than they describe. They simply haven't thought it through or they have but decided that it doesn't matter.

Another problem with internal inconsistency is related to characters. Characters are placed in positions of power or influence and then proceed to act with complete ignorance of a plethora of facts that 99% of the people placed in those positions would know. This reveals itself in spaceship captains ignorant of how their vessels function, villains with no sense of economics or tactics, and characters who exist mainly to be spoon-fed details of the plot.

These factors play into not respecting the intelligence of the reader. Authors often spoon feed the reader the most basic genre concepts or plot points, often repeatedly, via the mechanism of explaining those points to inept characters. Authors also make the assumption that whatever crazy idea they come up with will simply be accepted by the reader without any rationale.

A lot of science fiction and fantasy on television and film falls into this category. This can be palatable if there's enough action or humor or visual style. But I can rarely stretch my attention to two hours of this approach. It breaks novels for me. Mike Resnick's recent Starship novels fall squarely into this category in my view, as do most serialized novels based on popular movies or roleplaying games. There are always exceptions: John M. Ford's The Final Reflection is a very satisfying science fiction novel that happens to be set in the Star Trek universe.

I understand the reasons for this type of sci-fi and fantasy. Done with flair, it can be a good way to draw in new readers. I just don't care for it myself, because I'm not a new reader anymore. And I don't like it when recent works in this style get widely celebrated as masterpieces of the genre, because they aren't.

Literary Experiments
These are novels that tell a story in a style designed to be confusing, to shake up the reader. The most frustrating thing about these types of novels is that you get the sense that the author could write something much more satisfying and comphrehensible if they wanted to, but that they choose to be vague.

One approach is to use indecipherable language. Sometimes an author that I like will produce one of these and leave me scratching my head. Ian M. Banks's Feersum Endjinn was like that. I just couldn't labor through what the narrator was saying.

Another approach is to use a nonlinear narrative or no clear narrative structure at all. A common tactic is to present many different mysteries or paradoxes in the course of the novel and then explain none of them. Often these novels will suck you in with their clever writing, until you realize that they aren't going to provide anything resembling a satisfying conclusion, much less an explanation of what was happening in chapter four. In my view, Michael Swanwick is the master of this style of throwing out events and ideas without a care for explaining or resolving them, though I have to say that I just don't get Gene Wolfe either.

Some writers like to populate an entire novel with unlikable characters or center the novel on a main character with no discernable redeeming qualities (and I count being interesting or clever as a redeeming quality in this case). I can't think of any reason to do this with a work of fiction other than to try to upset reader's expectations and be daring in some way. M. John Harrison has done this, for example. If I get 100 pages into a book and don't care in any way what happens to any of the characters, then why am I reading it? Alistair Reynolds did this with Revelation Space, but I've found several of his other works less troubling in this regard.

As far as I can tell, writers who produce more than one book of the Literary Experiment style tend to stick with it. And it's the style I'm most likely to hate and whose practitioners most consistently leave me completely cold as a reader. They also tend to win awards, like avant garde types in any creative pursuit.

Unlike the Hackneyed style, I really can't see the point of this style of fiction outside of the short story length. If you want to be weird and obtuse for the sake of being weird and obtuse and conveying some sort of feeling, you can do that at the short story length without punishing your readers. I always get a significant whiff of arrogance from the authors who indulge themselves in this fashion.

Essentially, I believe that the point of writing both fiction and nonfiction is to communicate something coherent to the reader, and nearly all literary experiment novels fail badly on that score with me.

There's another style of science fiction and fantasy that sometimes works for me but fails at a fairly high rate due to the many pitfalls it contains.

Big Idea Obsessions
Science fiction is more prone to this than fantasy, as far as I can tell. There are really two different problems here for me.

The first type of Big Idea novel problem revolves around characters, or rather the lack of interesting, believable characters. A science fiction novel based around a big idea doesn't have to be bereft of well-rounded, intriguing, lifelike characters that you can appreciate as a reader. But oh so many of them are. They plod ahead with cardboard characters and plots that exist only to illuminate the central concept that the author is obsessed with.

This problem has plagued science fiction stories from the beginning of the genre, for the simple reason that some science fiction readers don't care about characters. What they want is a kind of speculative, technical nonfiction disguised as fiction. And that's fine by me. I just have no personal interest in that style. Some very popular writers fall into this category for me.

The character issue can manifest in another way that it less prone to criticism but which utterly fails for me as a reader. The author might create a huge tableau of characters, each seen in a brief glimpse before the narrative moves on to other characters. The result is that as a reader I never feel a connection to any of the multitude of characters tossed onto the scene in pursuit of the Epic Narrative, such as the fulfillment of a prophecy, which in these stories is a stand-in for the Big Idea. This is the type of Big Idea Obsession approach that fantasy is most prone to, although I have seen it the science fiction of authors like Stephen Baxter and Kim Stanley Robinson, whose work draws accolades but generally leaves me cold. I like to have anchor characters who persist over the course of the narrative.

The other Big Idea Obsession problem is the Mighty Technological Gimmick that Makes No Sense while dominating the plot. Some authors come up with an idea that sounds cool but which they are either incapable of explaining or which just doesn't hold together when you look at it closely, as one might over the course of a long novel. Tony Daniels' Metaplanetary was one of the most recent such ideas I've encountered.

A related category is the Mighty Technological Obsession That is Boring or Extraordinarily Technical. When boring, the concept might work in a short story, but can't sustain a novel. Nancy Kress's Probability Moon fell into this category for me, as did Alistair Reynold's Revelation Space, ultimately. When the Obsession is Extraordinarily Technical, well, it's just over my head, I guess, because it never makes sense to me yet I suspect that to someone thoroughly versed in an arcane technical or scientific field it holds together.

Big Idea Obsessions can work for me if the idea holds together and the author surrounds it with some interesting characters.

Some writers are mainly Big Idea Obsession types, framing their stories around the exploration of one big esoteric concept. Larry Niven has both hits and misses in this style, as do Greg Egan, Robert J. Sawyer, and Wil McCarthy. Others bounce around, writing a variety of novel styles. An example would be Greg Bear, who has some excellent Big Idea Obsession novels among his output.

What I Like: Well-Crafted Speculative Storytelling
This approach includes stories that have:

• At least one interesting, multi-dimensional fleshed-out character or side that I can care about.
  
• A small group (at most) of point of view characters or a consistent omniscient viewpoint that concentrates on what happens to a fairly small group of characters. Social experiments strongly indicate that people don't make more than four to seven close friends at any point in their lives. Likewise, I don't care about the details of what happens to a dozen or more different characters in a single story or novel.
• Good dialogue.
  
• Interesting technology or magic that doesn't dominate the entire story. That sort of thing works much, much better in short stories than novels. If the concept is rich enough, with enough twists and turns to be worthy of novel-length exploration, then it desperately needs to be tied to the types of characters noted above. I don't care so much about how technology or magic affects civilization in the abstract; I care about how it affects people that I've come to care about in some way.
  
• Narratives that start at Point A and end up at Point B, not Point A or Point A-2. Don't loop. Something needs to change.
  
• Novels that offer some sort of resolution to the major challenges that they present during the novel. There can be dangling issues left unresolved, but if you say in the first few chapters that the immediate goal of the characters is X, then by the end of several hundred pages they had damn well better have achieved or failed to achieve X in a clear fashion.
• Stories that don't invoke something ridiculous from out of the blue to save the characters and the author.
• A sense of wonder and adventure. That's what I read speculative fiction for in the first place.
  

On the bright side, there are MANY novels like this out there. More really good books than I can read in any given year, with more being written all the time.

And I've learned that most of the writers who have produced some of the novels that I cited as examples of styles I can't stand have written other novels that I thought were great. I can't say with much certainty anymore that "I love author X or loathe author Y." This makes the idea of celebrating a particular writer a little less relevant to me. I celebrate particular stories and books and appreciate authors for having written those specific works.

Perhaps the Internet is an apt metaphor for the current state of fantasy and science fiction. Most of what is on the Internet is crap. It's still full of great stuff. Similarly, there is more bad speculative fiction (in my view) being published and celebrated than I would have thought possible. At the same time, the quantity of Really Good Stories is also tremendous.

So it's a great time to be a fan and a reader, but that doesn't make me any less critical.

Review: Purple and Black

This fantasy is an epistolary novella, told entirely through the letters written between Nicephorus, the young and recently crowned ruler of the Vesani empire, and Phormio, an old school chum who has been sent to the embattled frontier more for his loyalty to the embattled emperor than as a result of any personal qualifications.

As is apparently in keeping with Parker's other fantasy works, this is more of a historical fantasy about an alternative world without magic, strange creatures, or wondrous landscapes. It's a highly political story, focused on the machinations of individuals in an old, corrupt imperial bureaucracy trying to acquire or preserve power and authority. And it is ultimately a tragic story of friendship, youthful idealism, and betrayal.

The conceit of telling the story through letters works well because the letters themselves are typically brief and to the point. There are some twists and turns that gave themselvs away a bit earlier than I would have liked, but the development of Phormio and Nicephorus's characters is handled well, with little bits of their backstory emerging.

The setting felt odd to me: clearly everyone is fighting at a high medieval level, with armor, swords, and so forth. Yet there are sections in the story where it is made quite clear (in fact, it is key to the plot) that there is a rather sophisticated record-keeping apparatus in place within the empire, to the degree that every piece of armor mass-produced by certain companies receives its own lot number. And books seem to be quite commonplace, at least among the elite. There are references to specific editions of multiple works and of texts updated over decades. All of this lends a somewhat more modern feel to what is otherwise a lower-tech society. I'm not sure how well it works; at times it felt anachronistic, even given that this is a make-believe world.

On the other hand, it did make me want to check on whether the Roman Empire or one of the Chinese dynasties employed such detailed and well-organized record-keeping for military matters.

I wouldn't spend the $20 or so to buy a hardcover of this novella; it's just too slight of a story for that sort of outlay unless you are a big K.J. Parker fan (this is the first of her books that I've read). However, the story is well worth reading if you can find it at the library or perhaps someday included in an anthology.

Review: Night Watch by Sean Stewart

This is one of those incomplete reviews I write every so often when I make it a significant way into a book (at least 150 pages or so) but just can't find the interest or enthusiasm in me to finish reading.

The book in question is Night Watch by Sean Stewart, a writer who has received high praise for other novels such as Resurrection Man, Perfect Circle, and Galveston. This is the first book of his that I tried to read, and I think I may have picked one of his less successful efforts.

Stewart writes some beautifully evocative prose, and that's what kept me reading as long as I did. I found the dialogue less successful, but enjoyable at times. The setting just did not hold together well for me, and the plotting was uneven at best. The experience of reading the novel was akin to that of watching an artsy version of an action movie made by a gifted cinematographer and a below-average director.

Throughout the book I had the feeling that I had picked up the second or even the third book in a series, one in which all the characters have already been introduced and a certain amount of their intertwined personal histories played out. However, though this novel is set in the same broad setting as Resurrection Man, in which magic is reintroduced to the world following World War II, it apparently takes place long after the events in the earlier novels.

Two hundred pages into this book I couldn't tell you who the main characters were or what exactly their goals were aside from "try to save Vancouver's Chinatown from destruction" for a number of them. I didn't come across any characters that I liked with the possible exception of Wire and Ant-something-or-other, and I really didn't care what happened to any of them.

As far as the unusual setting, a future that mixes various levels of technology with the presence of uncontrolled magical forces, I have no real sense of how magic is supposed to work in this setting, which is always a problem for me, though not for everyone. Magic without limits or rules communicated in some fashion to the reader becomes, in my view, a plot device that is too easy to abuse.

More significantly, I don't know how the people in this setting really view magic. There are a bunch of tough, militaristic white Canadians who are supposed to have a very rational view of the world because they've pushed the magic away into one corner of their city. This seems kind of unbelievable to me, but the real shocker was having a character named Claire, whose mother was a Hawk Goddess called the Harrier, express skepticism about the "superstitious" nature of the Chinatown inhabitants. I would think that her own origins would have cured her of any such traits. And the people of Chinatown are afraid of these white techno-magical cyborg soldiers they've hired as mercenaries, but it's patently obvious that these guys are no match for the magical "Gods" or Powers that live in and around Chinatown.

Ultimately I didn't finish the novel because I didn't trust the author to answer any of the questions that I was interested in. There's a scene where Stewart goes on for at least six pages about a character's efforts to build a fire to save himself. Now, to begin with, I was not invested in that character at that point in the narrative. Even if I was, six pages of him repeating the same basic actions over and over to stave off the cold and get a fire lit was severe overkill. And then the character disappears, at least for the next 100+ pages that I bothered to read. Why on Earth invest that much narrative and reader effort in the struggles of a bit character who is only going to disappear?

Later on, Stewart sets up a scene when several characters are about to embark upon a dangerous attempt to save the life and possibly the soul of a man trapped by demons. Their main resources are the fighting experience of a 95 year old man and the magic sword that his son has brought him. Then Stewart chooses to skip over that scene entirely. We rejoin the characters after they have completed the mission successfully.

The experience of those two scenes encapsulated much of the novel for me. Pages of descriptive prose spent upon topics that I would have happily devoted at most a paragraph of my attention to, and a complete overlooking of various scenes that would have interested me.

I think that in this novel this tendency to toss key scenes "off-screen" and spend time on odd little exchanges goes beyond a quirky choice to emphasize certain literary elements over "less sophisticated" action sequences. It's more like the novel just has no focus, no sense that when you set up the audience to anticipate a big confrontation and then just blow it off as an afterthought, you're toying with them. It felt like a bait and switch. If he wanted to write an atmospheric novel about unlikable characters in a dreamlike setting, I don't think he should have included the military aspects and the battle for the city, because they just don't work here.

Based on his reputation, I'd like to give another Stewart novel a try, but it will be a while before I bother to get around to it. I think I'd rather read a book of poetry by Stewart as opposed to a book of prose.

Review: Midwinter by Matthew Sturges

Picked this book up on a whim on the new books shelf at one of my local libraries.

It's the first novel by Sturges. He's a comic book writer whom I hadn't heard of, though apparently he's written some stuff in the Fables line that I actually might have read but not realized Bill Willingham had a partner on. And reading the acknowledgments, it looks like Chris Roberson, whom I saw at Armadillocon this year, was one of his readers and helpers with the novel.

Anyway, Midwinter is a fantasy novel set in a Faerie Realm. A former member of Queen Titania's Royal Guard gets released from prison to carry out a secret mission, so secret that he doesn't know exactly why he is doing it. He assembles some other prisoners to help him out.

It was a good if unspectacular book. Part of the problem was that I thought a couple of the main characters were pretty flat--there's a human in the party who does next to nothing and has no significant skills, which really stands out given all the magical abilities of the others. Sturges does about as much as he can with the lead protagonist, Mauritaine, who is one of those "incredibly competent and completely bound by his code of honor" types of characters. To be honest, I would have liked the book a little better if he hadn't been the main guy.

There are some good villains and some nice twists. I like the image of Unseelie Queen Mab's floating city. And I think Sturges does a good job for the most part of presenting the Faerie Lands and their history in a very economical fashion. The plot moves ahead without too many hiccups and the story sets itself up for sequels while still bringing the main plotline that it introduces to a satisfying conclusion.

So I'd recommend this, not as something that will amaze you, but as a good first effort by a writer who can craft a solid story and clearly has a vision for an intriguing world. The Dresden Files stories, though they have a very different feel, began in a similar fashion and just got better. I suspect Sturges has that same potential.

First Workshop Experience

On August 15th I attended a sci-fi/fantasy/horror (speculative fiction, in general) writing workshop at Armadillocon 31 (their server seems to be having trouble, hence the indirect link) in Austin, Texas.

The pros:

• If you attend the convention itself for both days, the additional cost for the workshop cost is quite minimal. I got my convention pass as a birthday present, but I believe it works out to an extra $10 for the workshop, which is quite cheap.
• There are professional writers and editors participating in the workshop, so you can get their insight into your work. You can also talk to them as individuals about the craft of writing in general.
  
• A lot of published speculative fiction writers in particular seem to have gone through the workshop experience at some point, so it is probably something you should try out.
• The general approach of these workshops seems to be "kinder and gentler" than the brutal-by-reputation experience of something like the Turkey City workshop. Plus, you don't have to be a professional writer to attend.
• It is interesting to read the work of other aspiring writers, especially if you perceive them to be at or above your level of ability.
  

The cons:

• The actual time spent critiquing your particular submission is not all that long. I was the last person in my group to get critiqued and everyone--four other amateur writers, a recently published author, and a longtime sci-fi editor for Tor books--sort of rushed their way through commenting on my piece in about half a hour, which is not long given that six people were voicing opinions.
• Regardless of how civil the experience may be, it is still very uncomfortable to sit silently listening to other people find flaws in your submission until everyone has finished and you get a chance to respond (the so-called Milford Method).
• It can be hard to tell if people are criticizing aspects of your writing that they genuinely don't like, are trying to knock you down a peg to be competitive, or are just grasping at points to criticize. I think my group was pretty honest and fair.
  
• If you're like me, it will feel very much like you spent more time critiquing other people's work with specific suggestions and questions than they did critiquing your own. This probably stems from my background as an editor and someone who gets called in to do rewrites of "broken" textbook material.
  

Was it a good experience for me? Upon reflection, which has taken me a week or so, I can offer a guarded YES. Was it an enjoyable experience? No, not really.

• I was very disappointed in how people reacted to the chapter I wrote. It seems that there were a few more positives in the written comments on the chapter than in the verbal ones, but it took me a couple days to be willing to look at the written comments after the many perceived flaws in my chapter were enumerated out loud and in person.
• Several things that people complained about regarding the chapter seemed to arise from either not reading carefully (such as missing a paragraph of dialogue discussing a character's motivation) or on odd personal biases (the word "Elf" just turned one person off, though there were no Elves in the chapter itself).
• Nobody commented at all on certain framing aspects of the story that I was proud of and that other readers had enjoyed.
• Everyone in my workshop noted a couple of clear mistakes in the chapter that needed to be addressed; one of which I had already tackled in a rewrite. This was criticism I needed to hear.
• All but one person in my workshop also disliked the pacing of the chapter, a criticism I'm still struggling to evaluate. These readers thought the chapter opened too slowly and the main character took too long to spring into action. I wanted to work against the standard fantasy scenario of "protagonist leaping into conflict without weighing the consequences" by having my lead think about whether it was worth it to get involved. But this moral conundrum failed utterly to draw people in.

So the most useful lessons I got from the workshop were:

• The workshop experience makes me personally uncomfortable. I don't mind critiquing other people, and the feedback I received suggested that I did so in the specific, positive and constructive way that I was aiming for--but this took a lot of work on my part to think through ahead of time. Being on the receiving end of blunter and more sweeping criticism from others was really unpleasant. I'd much prefer it in a situation that wasn't face-to-face.
  
• It is far better to submit a complete short story to a workshop than a chapter of a longer work, because the entire story can be evaluated and the reader has to guess less at motivations and conclusions.
• You can't introduce moral dilemnas for a character that the readers haven't invested themselves in yet.
• You have to establish the sense of place and atmosphere in a speculative piece very early and continue to build upon it.
  
• Subtle hints about events apparently require a defter touch than I currently possess, at least for openings. Establish clear motivations and provide clear explanations right off the bat.
• I probably need to be more concise about internal motivations and less concise about external descriptions.
• In general, if readers don't see the key information that you've provided to help them navigate a scene, then you've buried or poorly worded that information. Just because it is there doesn't make you right if a majority of the readers don't see it.

So on the one hand I learned from the workshop. On the other hand it did not inspire me to write and in fact made me question my motivations at length. I can't imagine what something like the Turkey City workshop experience would be like; it sounds awful.

In general I don't like the "tear someone down and see if they can survive it" or "toss them in to see if they can swim" training scenarios. A lot of people call this "tough love" or "brutal honesty." I think it's an approach supported primarily by socially inept people obsessed with a pseudo-Darwinian idea of natural selection or by people who don't actually want to teach anything, just to weed out the weak.

I prefer the "establish someone's limits, then encourage them to surpass those limits by offering encouragement and incremental goals that they can achieve." This is probably a mindset I got from physical fitness training, where you clearly get better physical and psychological results by guiding people to succeed at repeated, incrementally greater challenges rather than by pushing them to repeated failure. So in this case, try to guide the writer of a weak story toward improving the piece that they were trying to write so that it does a better job of doing what they wanted it to do. Then push/encourage them to do MORE than they originally wanted.

I do think the Armadillocon workshop was built somewhat along the latter lines, but it was too short to accomplish a great deal. That's just a fact of life and not intended a dig at the organizers. Limited time and money get you limited results.

I can't say that the experience made me eager to try to seek out a local workshop group. I have doubts that I could find many speculative fiction writers in my area in the first place and even more doubts that such a group would be constructive.

Distractions and Mash-ups: Samurai-Fantasy-Horror-Western

One of my fundamental flaws as a writer is related to a basic component of my personality: I'm easily distracted.

I'm also curious about a lot of stuff. And I have an uncontrollable urge to mash concepts and genres together.

This relates strongly to the not finishing a story aspect. I get distracted by something new that I'm reading and try to force some ideas from it into a setting or character concept or plotline that is already developed. [This is related to another troubling issue--I get bored with stories once I think I've figured out how to solve the major challenges with them.]

I recently finished a novel that was something of a western homage to samurai films and legends, watched some vampire television, and listened to some western-themed instrumental music. So of course I'm now trying to apply all of these themes to a short story concept I had several years ago, as well as attempting to compress a story that was originally 22,000 words (way too long to submit to most markets and far too short to be a novel) down to 7500 or 5000 words.

It is, shall I say, somewhat rough going. One of those things where I wonder if I'm a loon for even trying. But I want to try to finish it.

I have, however, decided upon an ideal martial style for fighting among and against vampires: Japanese sword-fighting, with its emphasis on powerful slashing strokes that sever limbs and decapitate foes. Because you can't really stab a vampire to death unless you've got a stake and great accuracy. And any sane vampire in a fantasy setting would wear some sort of armor protecting their heart, front and back.

So you're left with the need to hack the shit out of someone to incapacitate them. Vampires are strong and fast and seem unfazed by pain in many forms, but unless you're dealing with the ridiculous stuff like "turns into fog," they aren't impervious to steel. Chop off arms and legs and they should slow down. This approach should also work reasonably well against zombies.

To make it a little cooler, I decided that the vampire samurai equivalents in this setting also carry a traditional pair of swords, but instead of the long and short swords favored by the samurai, they carry a metal sword and one made of hard wood with a sharp point. The wooden one is the "mercy blade" for dealing with mortals and the "finishing blade" for staking fellow vampires.

Plus I think that the samurai loyalty and artistic aspects go very nicely with vampires. A vampire lord's retainers will all literally owe their vampiric status to the lord, so their blood is his to shed. And if they live a long time, they'll eventually get bored with mastering the blade and have to cultivate some other artistic pursuits.

It would be too confusing and complicated to explain the western influences at this point. And I should add that none of the main characters is even a vampire at this point. Which shows how useful all this thinking is.

VIGNETTE--SEA PASSAGE

This vignette deals with the content in the Alternate Worlds post.

Simon stood on the deck of the small merchant, bracing himself against the wooden railing as the hull rocked in the wake of the massive junk that churned through the dark waters ahead of them. The Samaran merchant had barely fit within the golden arc of the Gate that bestrode the causeway to Rocassa.

Simon glanced back, but the jumbled red rooftops of the port city were long out of sight, lost on the other side of the Veil. The horizon has disappeared as well, the heavens completely obscured by a dense fog that crawled along the surface of the water but stopped just short of enveloping the ships.

A Sea Dragon with a head the size of a cow emerged quietly from the water ahead of Simon, its serpentine body undulating behind it, the scales glistening with their own light. Along with its fellow Navigator somewhere ahead of the vast bulk of the merchant, the Dragon had contracted to shepherd the Samaran to its destination. Suddenly the vessel shot ahead, driven by an invisible current called by the Navigators. In moments it was lost within the fog.

Simon’s vessel was too poor to hire the service of Navigators. Its captain and crew would have to rely on darker forces to pass through the dreaming seas of the Veil. As would Simon and the other passengers. Most of them huddled below decks, trying to hide from the toll that was coming. But Simon had made rough passage before, and he knew that there was no concealment from what was coming, nor any pattern to who was chosen to pay the price. So he stood on the slick planks of the deck, free from fetid air and the stink of fear that filled the hold.

He could not have said when the Dreamers first appeared. They rose from the depths of the sea, bulbous bodies and streaming tentacles illuminated by thousands of phosphorescent dots like brilliant, multi-colored stars. Patterns shimmered across their skin, hypnotic and soothing. One of them broke the surface in front of Simon and drifted before his eyes like a soap bubble. His knuckles white where he gripped the rail, he stood transfixed as it extended a lazy tentacle and eased it into his skull.

Disconnected sensations and snippets of past events flashed through his mind in a confused jumble as the Dreamer probed his memories, rifling through them as a thief might sift through a chest, seeking the rarest gems. At last it came to a decision and gave him a choice as to the tribute he would offer. He closed his eyes and bit down hard on his lip, then chose.

There was a terrible pain as if something deeply rooted in his head was being plucked out, then a sense of disorientation and loss, and then darkness.

When he awoke the sun of a new world was beating down on his face as he lay slumped on the damp timbers. Frantically he clutched at the purse hanging from his belt and loosed the drawstring, dumping its contents into his hand. He passed the little tokens and trinkets before his eyes, recalling the significance of each with a brief sigh of relief.

But then there was a single figurine, a small, crude carving of a girl with a terse inscription at the base. In Memory of Maria.

Simon leaned back, squeezing the figurine in his hand as if he could force some essential drop of the past to spill from it. But no memory came.

He heard the muffled pain of plaintive wails rising from below decks through the wood, only to be drowned out a moment later by the singing of the crew as they set about raising the sails to catch the sea breeze that chilled the tears on Simon's cheeks.

Copyright 2009 by Doug Sims

TRAVELING BETWEEN ALTERNATE WORLDS

How do you get far-flung empires without space travel? Lots of Earth-like planets? Humanoid aliens that can eat the same food as humans? By visiting lots of alternate Earths. But certain limitations need to be enforced to tell the kinds of stories I wanted to tell.

The Goal
I didn't want to tell alternate history stories. I didn't want to tell stories about how magical societies clash with modern technological cultures. I didn't want to tell Amber-style stories.

But in a wide-open alternate world setting, those types of stories are almost unavoidable. where anything you can imagine must exist somewhere among the alternate universes. There's nothing wrong with those kinds of stories. Other people are telling them quite well, however.So I came up with some rules governing travel between alternate worlds. I want these to be logical, but their real purpose is to reinforce the kinds of stories I am interested in.

The Rules of Travel
There are probably an infinite number of alternate worlds, and with great effort and under certain limitations, you can travel between them. You can’t access all the alternate possibilities, however, for three reasons:

• Law of Similarity: If the timelines of a pair of alternate worlds are too similar, you can’t pass between them. Think of it as the principle of like repels like in magnetism. You can’t go to an alternate world and meet a doppleganger version of yourself, for example. You can’t even find two versions of history in which Alexander the Great did different things. But you can find many cases of parallel evolution and development.
• Law of Opposition: If a pair of worlds are too divergent in their timelines, you can’t create the necessary magical formulas for the gateway, and travel between those worlds is impossible. The underlying natures of the worlds are just too alien to be reconciled.
• Law of Magic: Related to the magical Laws of Similarity and Opposition, this simply boils down to the maxim that you can’t forge a gateway between a world in which magic works and one in which it doesn’t. The fundamental laws governing each universe are too distinct for the gap to be bridged.

These conditions leave a large but still limited “window” of worlds that can freely interact with each other. In my setting there are dozens of worlds connected to each other by social, political, and economic ties. Worlds that belong to this interplanetary network are known as Named Worlds. Most of the Named Worlds lie within the sphere of influence of one or more of the major interplanetary Powers.

Cousins, Not Twins
The Earth is very similar in its general aspects from one alternate world to the next: the continents are the same basic shape, the world is the same age, the Moon is still there, the same principles of geology and meteorology apply. There is a representation of the fundamental geography shared by all Earths called The Map of All Worlds.

However, there are many differences that, while small on the global scale, are significant on the local scale. Coastlines are different, rivers run slightly different courses, and ocean currents may shift. Extreme events such as severe weather, volcanic eruptions, major earthquakes, and even meteor strikes can vary from world to world, leading to differences in climate.

And different species may have evolved, survived, or gone extinct. Mutations like blue eyes and red hair or violet eyes and white hair may have spread on one world and not another.

So each world has its own flavor. But all the variation is within certain parameters.

Ties to the Setting

The system of Elemental magic outlined in the previous posts (see the Schema, Elementalism I and Elementalism II)is practiced primarily within what I'm calling for now the Draconic League, an association of states (in the sense of being independent, sovereign polities) directed by the teachings and direct rule of Dragons.

The bulk of these states are feudal structures centered on land ownership, such as the Green Kingdoms. Some of the most influential are the independent city states known as the Seven Sisters. All share the fact that Dragons of various types were the first to master the art of communicating with and controlling the Elementals around them, crafts that they taught to their human followers, allowing those followers to conquer their rivals.

The key magics of the Draconic Leagues are Elementalism and Alchemy.

One of the major rivals to the Draconic Leagues is the Celestial Empire, dominated by worship of the various Hosts of spirit beings known collectively as the Gods Above. The Celestial Empire has mastered the manipulation of Spirit itself and tends to regard manipulating the Elements as an inferior practice, preoccupied with the impure material world.

Elementalism Clarified, Part I: Spirit and Elementals

Aaron's comment on the previous post made me think about expressing the elemental concept more clearly. All Elements are tied to Spirit, which gives them a connection to living beings, which provides an avenue for communicating with and manipulating elemental forces.

The Role of Spirit
The underlying idea is that Spirit connects all the elements that represent matter and forces in the physical world--something similar to the 18th century concept of the ether, an intangible substance/energy form surrounding and flowing through objects.

Humans and other self-aware beings (including most higher animals) have souls that bind Spirit energies into intricate patterns (Soul-Knots) that store and process information, producing perception, intelligence, and insight.

Elementals are manifestations of the physical forces and energies in the world that also contain Spirit binding patterns, but of a less complex and more focused nature. As a generalization, Elementals tend toward expressing themselves and interpreting the world in terms of emotion, intuition, or will as opposed to rational thought.

Over the centuries, as beings with souls have died, fragments of many of those souls have become linked to Elemental patterns with which they shared an affinity. The result has been a gradual increase in the "personality" and awareness expressed by Elementals with multiple soul fragments forming a sort of gestalt identity within their pattern. Some have hypothesized that the increased practice of Elemental Bonding (see below) will result in Elementals acquiring more and more characteristics of humans, perhaps eventually becoming fully sentient beings in a rational sense. The impact of such a transformation is unknown.

Manipulating Elementals
It is by creating connections between these Spirit patterns (their own and those of the targeted Elemental) that humans and other intelligent beings communicate with Elementals. To facilitate a more powerful and coherent connection, a person has two choices.

• First, they can build up a familiarity with the Elementals of a specific location over time. This can involve repeated rituals and sacrifices, as well as regular mental exercises and visualizations to attune ones' self with the Elementals. The goal is twofold: enhance one's ability to empathize with the desires and perceptions of the Elementals and to insert ones' own pattern into what passes for Elemental memory.
• The second, more drastic option involves a person bonding him or herself with a particular Element, attuning their personal pattern to be more compatible with that of the Element they have chosen. Think of this as increasing both the bandwidth of the Spirit connection and improving the quality of the symbolic language used to communicate. At this level one can communicate with and control Elementals of the proper type in any given location. However, the price paid for this power includes physical and mental transformation of the bonded person.

Of Human Bondage
What follows is a brief description of the physical effects of elemental binding. Waterbound people grow very fat and though graceful may tire easily on land, but move with seal-like ease in the water. Firebound individuals have very little body fat, with a dry, leathery texture to their skin (like a person with too much sun exposure, except they are not necessarily tan!). They also become infertile. Airbound people shrivel to skin and bone, and their bones themselves become more fragile. Earthbound people have stiffer joints and develop various fungal and mossy growths on their bodies.

Elemental Schema

Modified Post on 2/8/09: uploaded corrected image, updated format.


I wanted a new way of looking at elements for my fantasy setting that would incorporate all the elements I was interested in while also showing their relationships. Hence the graphic above.

The Scheme
I've been playing around with a way of classifying some of the classical elements alongside other elemental forces that seem significant to me. I've looked at sources like The Magician's Companion and Real Energy, among others. Still, the traditional western and Chinese elemental categories weren't quite satisfying to me.

The four classical elements are presented in their classic wheel formation. In between each neighboring primary elements on the wheel is a secondary element formed from a mixture of the two elements bordering it.

For example, Rain (which includes all precipitation) sits between Air and Water because it shares properties of both. Wood shares properties of Water and Earth, Metal shares properties of Earth and Fire, and Electricity (understood here as electromagnetism) shares properties of Fire and Air.

At the center of everything, interwoven with it on a quantum level, is the immaterial element of Spirit.

I feel pretty satisfied with this as a model organizing the basic "real world" forms of Forces and Matter that can be easily observed and distinguished from other types, with Spirit representing the essence that is perceived only indirectly by most.

I also think I can fit it into my fantasy setting very cleanly and that it will help me visualize and define the forms of elemental magic available and their interrelationships.

Considering the Topic of Hard Fantasy

I first came across the term Hard Fantasy in a reference to Michael Swanwick’s essay “In the Tradition,” which may well have coined the term. (I tracked down a used copy of The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror Eighth Annual Collection, which reprinted the essay.)

Swanwick’s own definition of Hard Fantasy as presented in the essay is unclear. He refers to the stories within this nebulous genre as “those strange and shaggy literary creatures that have no ilk or kin.” He sees their role within fantasy fiction as akin to that of hard science fiction within the broader s.f. genre and in opposition to styles such as High Fantasy and Urban Fantasy (though some of the authors he cites seem within the realm of Urban Fantasy). The essay itself is very eloquently written and references many books I’d never heard of before and for the most part still haven’t found the time to read.

The very term Hard Fantasy was a helpful jumping off point for my own ideas about how to go about writing in the fantasy genre. The analogy to hard science fiction suggested the application of rigor and logic grounded in scientific principles to the realm of the fantastic. In other words, unless otherwise specified, the laws of science as we know them apply. More critically to me, the principles of social organization and cultural structure that we see apply.

The best examples I can think of for what I’m getting at are three short stories by the incomparable Ted Chiang: “Tower of Babylon,” “Seventy-Two Letters,” and “Hell is the Absence of God.” These are all collected in his wonderful short story anthology “Stories of Your Life and Others.” In each story the social, personal, and physical ramifications of a central fantastic conceit (it is possible to build a tower that reaches all the way to the vault of heaven; the principles of kabbalah can be combined with philology to animate inanimate matter; the world is regularly visited by old testament style angels, terrible in their wrath and beauty) are explored with relentless insight.

Hard Fantasy for me is an approach to the creation of stories and settings as much as a method of writing them. It is a sort of mental alchemy by which I try to transmute my modern sensibilities into a perspective that can encompass the fantastic and the magical without losing my bearings.

You might think that by trying to define the fantastic in rational terms one would rob the resulting stories of the essential elements of fantasy. For me, at least, these are the ability to evoke a sense of mystery, fear, and awe/wonder in a reader. Things need to be a little unbalanced, with the unexpected waiting in the dark woods. There is a lot of darkness in the human past, a certain brutality to the old religions and fairytales that is often lost in the present. (Today I heard a wonderful interview on the radio program "Fresh Air" with Spanish director Guillermo del Toro that touches upon some of these points.)

Personally I also think magic should be a bit frightening, chaotic, and unpredictable. But it can still function according to certain principles, or be seen (perhaps with fingers crossed) to follow those principles. And you can extrapolate what sort of society would develop from a reliance upon and/or a fear of such a means of manipulating reality.

But the logic used to define the parameters of a setting does not have to be embraced by the characters and cultures who inhabit it, nor explicitly stated to the reader. Consider how many different interpretations of natural laws existed in ancient cultures around the world. So a “hard” perspective on the principles of fantasy can be the hidden scaffolding for the rest of the setting.

I’m interested in depicting the essence of ideas like faeries, goblins, werewolves, and vampires without necessarily worrying about being true to any particular interpretation of the folktales that have grown up around them. I want to think about what it would mean if they could and did exist in real ecologies and societies that last, as well as what they mean psychologically.

But I’m not so concerned with trying to explain why a vampire might, say, be unable to enter a home without being invited. I want to think about what a vampire or an elf represents as a cultural concept. Why are they fascinating? What reactions do they evoke in “mundane” people? How would that change if they were more commonplace?

Most critically, how would such beings see the world around them? Why would they act as they do? How are they being misinterpreted? The same holds true for concepts ranging from druidic worship to mushroom eating to cannibalism to Dionysian rites to visions of archangels blazing with holy fire in the desert.

I’m not suggesting that other people haven’t done this sort of thing. It’s just what drives my own interest. The intersection of my interests in anthropology, history, cognitive science, literature, mythology, and science, I suppose.
Why think about writing Hard Fantasy as I’ve struggled to present it here, as opposed to Hard Science fiction, “Soft Science Fiction” or “Science Fantasy?” That’s a subject for another post.