Arin i Asolde

Rant on flawed characters (again)

2009-12-18T15:20:31Z

Characters in most novels, of course, have to have flaws. Novels exist where they don’t, but often the character is either boringly idealized or part of a historical and cultural context that doesn’t exist in most twenty-first-century Western countries any longer. (Characters like Herman Melville’s Billy Budd and George Eliot’s Eppie are also meant to serve a specific allegorical purpose that’s rare for modern fantasy novels). But it’s also possible to make a character too flawed, or to add only “charming” quirks that don’t actually impact a character’s life in any discernible way. I’m sure you can think of at least one protagonist whose only fault was being too generous, or too kind-hearted. (I will never get back the hours of my life which I wasted reading The Wayfarer Redemption).

Here, then, are some (more) ideas about adding flaws to characters and what to do once you have them.

1) Realize not everyone is going to see the character the same way you do. This goes first because, although it’s not about adding flaws to characters as such, it might prevent you from entering the Reader-Reining Game.

What is the Reader-Reining Game? The attempt to fling a bridle around the reader’s neck and lead her only to conclusions you want her to come to. In this particular case, those conclusions are about characters. She “must” see the heroine as charming, the hero as noble, the villain as absolute evil, the girl who’s jealous of the heroine as petty and misguided rather than possibly having a point. Why? Because otherwise the book won’t work, of course!

Never mind that readers handled with reins (and whips, and spurs) are as likely to buck the writer off as anything else.

If you can accept that people will have widely-ranging reactions to even the most carefully delineated and flawed character—that someone will always find your heroine unsympathetic or too perfect, just as other people will fall in love with her—then you can spare yourself a lot of worry. This doesn’t completely ease the sting of getting the “wrong” reaction, of course. But it can give one a fascinatingly different perspective on one’s own writing. And it will prevent you from attempting the impossible, anticipating and countering every reaction, and filling your narrative with the sort of annoying authorial prods that are meant to steer people on one path and one path only as regards liking or hating or pitying the characters.

2) The part about “everyone not seeing the character the same way you do?” That applies to the other characters, too. One thing that bothers me lately, much more than it used to, is when the characters in a novel act like readers--as if they knew everything about the protagonist, the plot, or the villain that the readers of the book do, and always react with appropriate sympathy, anger, shock, or nausea. This is when I know that the author has either begun to let the characterization on the less “important” people go to pieces because she’s too enthralled with a few aspects of the story, or never had that characterization in the first place.

Yes, your secondary characters might be less important to the plot, the theme, and the major confrontation, but on the other hand, they can make or break your story, or keep someone reading for whom the protagonist is not interesting. God knows that I wouldn’t have stuck with Robert Jordan as long as I did if I wasn’t interested in the people who didn’t “matter.”

So. When your protagonist makes a mistake because of one of her character flaws, consider that the other characters might be inclined to react with less than the complete patience and understanding you want from the readers. If they’ve been dealing with this flaw for a long time, they might take the chance to storm and rage about it, or at least say, “I told you so.” One of the sources of total frustration I get from stories with teenage protagonists is how few I’ve seen where people who suffer because of an adolescent’s misplaced confidence or her selfishness ever get angry about it. Sure, the reader might know that she’s going to grow up and become totally awesome because they’ve read so many of these stories before, but to people on the ground who’ve just lost a battle because an untrained teenager decided that she could command troops like a seasoned general, I don’t think the story type will matter as much as the immediate, unrepentant asshole.

On the other hand, they might be inclined to be overly indulgent, too. The readers, privy to the protagonist’s interior monologue, could know that she blames herself, and she might have a lot to blame herself for. But her parents, or her best friend, or the person who’s in love with her, could cluck over it and reassure her that it’s not her fault, even when it is. And as long as this is natural to their characters and has reasonable consequences, I would be totally interested in seeing it! It’s only the too-knowledgeable, perfectly-calculated reactions I want to get rid of.

3) Try not to repeat and repeat again redundantly. In real life, of course, people often make the same mistake over and over again because they can’t cure their character flaws in a snap of the fingers. But fiction is not real life.

Balance things between having your character learn the perfect lesson from every mistake and having her do the same thing on page 3 and page 10 and page 14 and page 145. This is where having more than one flaw, or a variable one (see point 4), helps. Maybe the protagonist is on guard against making the same mistake again, but she isn’t paying attention to this other character trait that is also a nuisance. Therefore, she’s not perfect, but she also isn’t running in a tight circle of the same actions that will make the reader roll her eyes in those same tight circles and put the book down.

How to balance? Compare and contrast scenes you’ve written. In how many of them does the character say and do the same exact things, or almost the same things with only a bit of variation? If it’s several, consider cutting some of them, or—this is one of my favorite tactics—have the character start whining about a mistake or start committing one, and then have the plot interrupt. After all, why should the enemies stand around waiting for Miss Oh-Woe-Is-Me-For-I-Have-Sinned to finish her interior monologue?

(“I know you’re getting impatient to commit mindless mayhem, soldiers, but we have to wait three more minutes until the whining dies down.”)

Also, if the character makes a commitment or a promise to shape up and start watching her temper/her smart-ass comments/her recklessness/her selfishness, show her retreating from that commitment or promise, but not fully. I understand what authors are trying to do when they show the protagonist breaking such promises, but seeing them broken again and again provides too little forward momentum, in the same way that seeing endless scenes of brooding on flaws or the same mistake being made provide too little forward momentum. You can have verisimilitude if the protagonist breaks the promise, has an “Oh, shit!” moment, and immediately apologizes instead of dragging it out and refusing to admit she was wrong as she did before. Then, the next time, she can be a bit better about catching herself, and then better again the time after that. This, I think, provides a reasonable compromise between the demands of psychology and the demands of fiction.

4) Choose variable flaws, or flaws that you vary. Here you have a character. We will call her Helena. Helena sometimes thinks she was born angry. She loses her temper at the drop of a hat, talks back to people with the power to throw her in dungeons, says “witty” things that make her companions clap their hands over their eyes, and gets in a huff with her friends in a way that makes her stomp off and miss the major battles/discussions/moments of glory. (Note here that this character development requires treating a quick temper as a flaw, instead of an endless source of “wit,” which is an all-around bad idea. Most authors: Not As Witty As They Think They Are). Helena doesn’t hold grudges, but since she spends a lot of her time yelling at the same people, most of her victims don’t believe that. She makes her little sister, who’s much shyer and less confident, cry a lot. She feels sorry about some of these things, but she doesn’t like apologizing, so, when told to apologize, she sulks.

Those are different consequences for the way she gets angry. If the only one ever shown was that Helena got “witty” (seriously, how many eloquent and funny things do you say when your temper is on fire?) and people stood around slack-jawed, imagine how boring she would be to read about.

I firmly believe most flaws can be made to vary if they are simply worked on the right way. The problem is that authors fall in love with one way of expressing the trait—or, worse, change it so that the flaw never is a flaw (see point 5)—and, while you can certainly argue that the protagonist isn’t perfect, she is still boring to read about. I enjoy stubborn characters who get stubborn in different ways and for different reasons, not just because someone doubts their perfection. I enjoy ~~reckless~~ “spunky” characters who go dashing into danger and then get hurt or get others hurt, not simply come out covered with glory. I enjoy gossipy characters whose gossip makes other characters regard them as ill-natured, instead of coming back to bite them on the butt in the exact same way each time. Variation is the key to interest here.

5) Avoid “interview flaws.” I’ve made this point before, but I don’t think it can be emphasized enough. Try not giving your characters flaws that are only of the kind you would claim in an interview: “Oh, I’m too warm-hearted.” “Oh, I’m too much of a leader.” “Oh, I’m too responsible.”

Why? Because characters who have only these sorts of flaws are, of course, never treated as less than perfect by the author. There are ways that these things can turn around and bite them in the ass. The responsible person can take over responsibility from someone who resents her doing so, or make a hash of things because she’s trying to do too much at once. The warm-hearted character can be too indulgent to someone who doesn’t deserve the indulgence, or be duped and betrayed easily. The leader can thrust herself annoyingly into every leadership role available, ignoring the fact that she’s fit for exactly one of them, or grow arrogant when demanding obedience from others.

That you so rarely see these things with interview flaws is not an indication that the downsides don’t happen, of course. It’s simply an indication that the author gets lost in admiration for the character and/or doesn’t think that a certain quality can ever be bad. I assure you, in excess everything is.

6) Overloading the character with flaws does no good, either. Occasionally I see someone who’s gotten nervous, maybe because beta readers have told her her protagonist is too perfect, and decided to do everything from dumb down her character to make her ugly and clumsy. (Honestly, I don’t think ugliness and clumsiness count as flaws; I consider flaws things the character can help, rather than things she’s born with). The thing is, there’s no guarantee that a character will be loveable simply because she has a lot of negative qualities, either. You must resign yourself to people not loving your character. (Stencil Point 1 on the back of your eyelids if you must).

Besides, if your character literally has no good traits and yet the people around her adore her anyway, you’ve already failed a crucial test. Minor characters’ reactions to the protagonist should make sense, not be manipulated for the sake of the plot.

Try to strike a normal, human balance. Your protagonist can have an abundance of good traits, as long you don’t spend the book acting as her chorus of praise and screaming at the top of your lungs, “See? See? Everyone should fall at her feet!” She can have lots of bad ones, as long as you show them affecting her and the world around her with some psychological realism. And she can be pretty much an ordinary human being who has some flaws and some good traits, knows about some of these and never notices others, and spends her life doing what she needs to do to get by, with some flashes of cowardice and grace under fire.

A rant on loyalty is probably next.

More book reviews

2009-12-08T00:16:29Z

More books I finished recently, this time reading for my dissertation.

George Meredith, One of Our Conquerors

A Victorian novel by one of the authors I’m studying, which I’d read before, but found much more satisfying this time. It’s the story of Victor Radnor, the “conqueror” who has made his fortune in business and now thinks he’s going to enter on a scene of social triumph by establishing himself in a new home, Lakelands, and running for Parliament. He’s tried to establish himself twice before, but each time his neighbors discovered he is not actually married to the woman, Nataly, who passes for his wife—Victor’s legal wife, Mrs. Burman, whom he abandoned, is still alive—and ran them out of the neighborhood. Victor is pushing for Lakelands despite Nataly’s fear that the same thing will happen again. He’s also trying to contract a prestigious marriage for their illegitimate daughter, Nesta (who doesn’t know she’s illegitimate), though Nataly also opposes this.

This is an incredibly subtle and cruel novel when it comes to the psychology of the characters. As Victor sees it, Nataly is hounded by the persecution of a world that can’t recognize true love when it sees it and by Mrs. Burman, but he’s the main aggressor. He tortures her to death, never realizing what’s happening. Nataly, who has gone along with his plans for years, cannot bring herself to make more than token protests. The silence stifles her, and so does her fear of what Nesta will say when she finds out the truth about her birth. When Nesta befriends a “fallen” woman named Judith Marsett, things become even worse for Nataly. She doesn’t want her daughter to suffer the same things she did, and her love for Nesta turns into an obsessive concern about Nesta’s “purity.”

As usual, Meredith spares none of his characters, except maybe Nesta, who is stronger and braver than her parents, and Dartrey Fenellan, Nesta’s love interest. (One of the interesting things about Meredith’s later novels is that he reverses the usual gender dynamic and turns the admirable men into love interests and rewards for his heroines, who he is really more interested in). Nesta’s growth toward truth and love and a feeling of kinship with the women her mother has tried to keep her away from is about the only beam of sunlight in a novel that’s otherwise absolutely radiant with despair; you watch the inevitable happening and you can’t do anything to stop it. There is a reason—besides his continual deep flaws of style and structure—that Meredith was considered in the 1890s, when this novel was published, a great but not a popular writer.

Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging and Charles Darwin: The Power of Place

These are biographies of Charles Darwin—massive biographies of Darwin. They clock in at around 500 pages each. This is partially because Browne’s interested in establishing the historical and scientific context of Darwin’s work along with the facts about his life, and in analyzing his books, and in analyzing the books of other scientists, like T. H. Huxley and Charles Lyell, who supported Darwin, influenced him, and wrote in response to him. They take an awful lot of time to read, but they’re worth it. The first one covers his life up to about 1858, the year before the publication of The Origin of Species, and the second part is, of course, dominated by his publishing.

Browne makes a major point about Darwin’s correspondence and how his thousands upon thousands of letters helped him pull in information, assemble it, and recruit helpers who could pass along animal skins, feathers, observations, live animals, and books that further added to his pile of facts. She describes Darwin as a spider in the center of a web, and the metaphor is accurate. There is no way that Darwin could have gotten all of his observations by himself—especially since a large part of his life was spent in poor health and he couldn’t have traveled around the world to all the places he needed to see—but he could get, and use, them second-hand.

Browne also scatters the books with plenty of the fascinating little facts that help make biographies amusing. Darwin once stayed very still so that he could watch a wasp that was drinking out of his eye; he wrote indignantly as early as 1838 about how stupid people were to judge all animals by their own standards and how a bee would undoubtedly view humans as hopelessly backward in the instinct department; he liked trashy romance books that had pretty girls and happy endings; he was passionately interested in earthworms, molluscs, ants, beetles, and all sorts of “lesser creatures” that many people think of as neither interesting or likely to be so. He also got along well with his devout wife, Emma, and shared a full and busy life with her even though she knew full well that he couldn’t accept the existence of a benevolent God.

Incredibly rich books that depict an incredibly rich personality.

Anna K. Nardo, George Eliot’s Dialogue With John Milton

Nardo’s book, which was published in 2003, takes issue with one of the foundational ideas of feminist criticism about George Eliot: that she was dominated by her response to John Milton and never broke free of him. Instead, according to Nardo, Eliot did feel free to argue with Milton, to transform aspects of Paradise Lost into scenes in her own novels—scenes sometimes played straight and sometimes subverted—and to mock various legends that circulated about him.

The first chapter of this book is a long recapitulation of stories circulated about Milton in the 1700s and 1800s, stories that would have been familiar to Eliot’s audience and are almost lost to us now. The first was a story about Milton falling in love, either with an Italian singer or with a woman (probably Italian) who fell in love with him after seeing him asleep and whose face, barely seeing it, he mistook for an angel’s. (In some versions these are the same person; he supposedly met his admirer in Italy later and recognized her as the model of his “angel”). However, when he returned to England, he nobly gave up love in pursuit of the national ideal that led him to write Paradise Lost. The only trace of his lost love, according to this legend, is found in his version of Eve. The second story deals with Milton’s daughters, whom—depending on which author you read—either betrayed him by selling his books and tormenting him after he went blind, or who were “serviceable” to him and his art by recording his poetry and reading books in other languages, mainly Latin and Greek, that he taught them to scan but not comprehend. This story can be twisted to give different perspectives on female service to male creativity and female rebellion.

I’d known about a few of these resonances before, since I’ve been reading Eliot novels and criticism about Eliot for the past three years. But I hadn’t realized it went further than just the gentle mockery of Dorothea Brooke in Middlemarch when she wishes that she could marry a Milton figure because she would know how to value him and appreciate his learning, unlike his daughters, whom she thinks were awful. I find criticism fascinating that digs up a whole perspective I didn’t realize was there and explains it clearly enough that I can understand it.

Reviews of a few of the books I finished recently

2009-12-05T17:56:36Z

Ilona Andrews, Magic Bites

This is urban fantasy set in a future Atlanta where technology and magic come in “waves” that impact the functioning of cars, buildings, electricity, and many other aspects of daily life. Magic has been around for long enough that humans are adapting to it, as well as to the presence of other creatures like vampires—here, mindless undead beasts “piloted” by necromancers—and lycanthropes—here, victims of the Lycan-V virus and likely to become insane murderers unless they follow a very narrow code of behavior. Magic is slowly winning. The heroine is Kate Daniels, who, as per usual for this kind of book, goes into investigating the violent murder of her guardian with a host of secrets that are not fully explained, unusual combat techniques, and a dark family past.

There are several things I liked about this book. The worldbuilding is clever; it’s very different from the usual “the undead/fae are just starting to come out of hiding or are completely hidden” trope, and that alone earns it a lot of points. It’s also urban fantasy not set in New York City, another point-getter. The violence is brutal and not glossed-over, and there are plenty of different characters who compete for attention. The kickass heroine does have some limitations, and she actually has to stop and think about whether acting like a rabid lone wolf is worth the cost (that is, the consequences of people getting irritated with her). That’s an insight a lot of “normal” fantasy heroes could stand to have.

Also, this is a book that agrees with me that corpses that feed on human blood are not sexy.

I didn’t like the last quarter of the story much. Here a monologuing villain, there a randomly introduced new character that mainly seemed present to make sure the final battle wouldn’t be too tough for Our Heroes, over here the sudden eruption of the skeevy gender dynamics that I think they make you sign a charter to include in your urban fantasy…I’m not sure I’ll read more of the series. The last few pages, however, were enough to restore some of my interest.

Cindy Pon, Silver Phoenix

YA fantasy, set in an alternate world modeled on the Chinese empire. Ai Ling, who is proving impossible to betroth and also hearing people’s thoughts for some reason, is unhappy when her father leaves to go on a mission to the Palace, but is sure he will return soon. He doesn’t. She goes in search of him and runs into a half-foreign young man named Chen Yong, whose parents her father got in trouble for helping years ago. So they pursue their quest together, facing demons, people with one eye and four arms, and being lost forever in an alternate world.

I loved this. It has a setting that’s very unusual for Western fantasy and every character is of color except for the half-white Chen Yong, it makes the heroine the real center of the story and the performer of the quest instead of the young man she meets along the way (Chen Yong’s story is important, but definitely subordinate to Ai Ling’s), it has the heroine make mistakes, it keeps the romance properly subdued, and it has several passages of gorgeous description (I especially adored the dragon). The danger is properly scary. The ending threw my expectations off completely, although I suppose it’s possible to read that as sequel bait. Ai Ling is not as kickass as Kate Daniels, but she seemed much more real to me, despite living in an entirely different world.

It had flaws, of course. One of Ai Ling’s mistakes is so easily resolved that it felt a bit like a cheat; here’s the potential for a lot of conflict and soul-searching, and it goes away in a few pages. I detested the opening prologue, which shows Chen Yong being born, though mainly because I’ve read far too many fantasy prologues that center on the protagonist’s birth, apparently because authors think that the “Ooh! Babies!” impulse will attach you to someone who doesn’t have a name and hasn’t done anything yet. (This is one of the reasons I was so relieved to find out that Ai Ling and not Chen Yong was the main character). The major antagonist is introduced so late that he didn’t feel like as much of a threat to me as the characters took him as.

However, these are faults that didn’t destroy the book for me. I highly recommend it.

Caroline Stevermer, When the King Comes Home

This is a sort of alternate history; there are clear references to our own world, especially through evocations of Christianity and art, but the countries and cities that the story takes place in are imaginary. The main character is Hail Rosamer, who explains carefully in the first lines of the book that she has her name because her father was so happy to have a daughter after four sons, not because she is named after bad weather. Her family are wool merchants, but she travels to the capital city of Aravis to be apprenticed to an artist. The book is an account by Hail, when she’s much older and looking back over her life, of what happened when she became fascinated by the work of an artist named Maspero and got involved in the chaos surrounding the sudden reappearance of King Julian after two hundred years.

This book is an excellent example of how to write a first-person protagonist who comes off as something other than a smartass. Hail is not witty or charming or overwhelmed with angst. She annoys other characters considerably, constantly asks questions, gets obsessed with Maspero, stubbornly clings to her own course of action and then is sorry she did, and tends to see everything in terms of either art in general or Maspero in particular. But the flaws made her seem human to me—probably because I had no sense that the author expected me to love and adore Hail and credit her with every virtue. Not all of the other characters are equally vivid, but Good King Julian, his champion Istvan, and the various soldiers and artists who associate with Hail mostly are. Hail remains on the sidelines for most of the book, since she’s not a soldier and has no political power, but she’s involved in the events all the way from the beginning, and those events are interesting. Plus, I always enjoy a book about a protagonist who has an occupation that’s not mage, fighter, or thief.

Of course, Hail being an observer character has its own problems, in that sometimes the story feels strained as it includes her, and a few important events happen off-stage, away from her vision. The magical background, though required by the story, isn’t particularly detailed or original, which is probably also a result of Hail’s having little familiarity with it. If you don’t like Hail’s obsessions, you are going to find this book annoying as hell.

Luckily, this is one of those books that you would probably know you’d like or hate from reading the first few pages, so I recommend that you do that if you’re interested.

Signal boost

2009-12-03T00:40:32Z

Winterfox on LJ asked me to link to this post about a friend of hers who is facing eviction. This is what Winterfox says about it, since she explains the situation better than I can:

A friend of mine, shuju_the_red (http://shuju-the-red.livejournal.com/) is facing eviction if she can't gather $2,500 within a few days. She lives in the Philippines and this amount is very, very hefty for her; combined that with the fact that she had to bribe the police to get her mother out of a military camp not long ago--it cost her $10,000--she's severely hard-pressed to dredge up more money right now.

My own journal has limited exposure and I was hoping you might be willing to link to my friend's entry detailing Ju's circumstances, because every cent will help.

Rant on avoiding a villain monologue

2009-12-02T01:41:44Z

I’m sorry to have been gone so long. Major health issues as well as writer’s block on the rants meant that I had little to post. While I think I’ll be posting more regularly again, I can’t promise it.

_____________________________________________________________________________

This rant brought to you by Magic Bites, an urban fantasy novel that I read recently and liked well enough—with the exception of one major irritant. I bet you can guess right now what it is.

1) A traitor can tell you as much information as the villain and with better motivation. What bothers me the most about the villain confessing all his plans to the hero or heroine is that usually, he has no reason to do so. Indeed, it’s far better for him and for the plot if he keeps silent. Suspense and suspension of disbelief are not always cousins, but they are here.

If you absolutely must have someone in the know explain all the villain’s Byzantine plots to the protagonist, why not choose a traitor? Surely there has to be someone in the villain’s organization, army, or commune dissatisfied with the way he or she’s been treated. Or it could be because of something the heroes have done. Someone who’s watched her comrades go down to defeat after defeat can easily conclude that she’d like to be on the winning side just as much.

Now, the traitor might have only partial knowledge, depending on how important she was to the villain’s side. But so what? The partial knowledge means a longer tease, leading up to the all-important revelation scene when the protagonist stands awed by the gloomy glory of the villain’s plan. (See point 2).

There’s no reason to rely on dusty dramatic conventions for that all-important monologue when good old-fashioned self-interest will do.

2) Want a mystery element to your plot? Let the protagonist figure out what the villain wants. Quite a lot of stories have an element of the protagonist being puzzled by the villain’s actions. That is fine. Quite a few of these stories then go on to have the villain explain his actions to the protagonist. Not fine.

Seriously, why would you do this? If you’re going to introduce a mystery connected to the villain into the plot, presumably it’s there for a greater purpose than to be punctured like a balloon at the climax. Not to mention that someone who conceals her motives has a reason to conceal them, and that reason is never mentioned or simply negated if she eats the Exposition Mushrooms.

There may be a limit to how well your protagonist can play detective, but that’s where cleverness (of both writing and characterization) comes into it. Let her work with other people; that will build up the secondary characters more and save your heroine from leaping to “intuitive” conclusions about things she can’t actually know and becoming an Author’s Darling. Let her have a minor revelation that is reasonable and within limits that she can then use to connect the evidence that baffled her before. Let her consciously try out several different explanations, have them fail, and then pick the one that fits best.

All of these will make for a better plot and stronger growth on the protagonist’s part than forcing her to sit down and have the villain pour her ears full of poison.

3) Why would she believe this anyway? I’m trying to remember if I ever read a villain monologue in which the protagonist doubts what s/he’s hearing. I can remember a few novels in which the protagonist asked questions of the “But that doesn’t make sense! What about X?” variety, but none in which the monologue ended and s/he did anything but gape at the villain and accept that every part of the dastardly plan had happened exactly as the villain said it had.

No, seriously. Here you have someone who has tried to start a war/has committed murder/has committed rape/turned people into zombies/has tried to take over the world/has tried to destroy the whole of time and space/has done all of these things at once, and you believe him?

...Why?

If you think about it, the villain has every motive to lie, because when the protagonist tries to stop him, s/he will be trying to stop the wrong damn plan. I’m sure some of the sadistic villains that certain authors favor would get an extra laugh out of that.

Inserting a disbelieving protagonist into the scene would be a great way to avoid the usual pitfalls of the monologue, if for some reason you think you have a villain who would give such a monologue. But the time and place for such things is limited.

Which is why you take advantage of the ones that do exist.

4) Plant the protagonist in a place where she has reason to overhear the plan. This could mean infiltration; perhaps the villain is gathering an army and the protagonist sneaks in as a recruit, precisely to hear the inspiring speech that the villain gives to his troops. It could mean impersonation; the protagonist takes the place of someone close to the villain, if she is a good enough spy or actor. (Of course, there would have to be a good reason that the protagonist knew that the trusted adviser, or whoever else she’s playing, didn’t already know about the plan and could believably ask for information on it). It could mean magical eavesdropping from a distance, perhaps by astral travel, perhaps through the eyes of an insect or bird. It could mean suborning or seducing someone close to the villain.

Any and all of those would work better than the monologue. The villain must, on occasion, discuss his plan with other people. Even if he’s the paranoid sort who would never tell the whole of his scheme to anyone else, he has to give orders to his minions, and the protagonist, if she listened or sneaked around enough, could conceivably put the plan together from the separate sets of those orders.

5) Reconsider the reason for keeping the plan a secret at all. Most fantasy villains have to keep their plans secret because otherwise someone would try to stop them. The problem is, people try to stop them anyway based on whatever cover they come up with. If you’re a villain, and you’re really secretly trying to steal a country’s most precious art treasures to use them in a dastardly dark magic ritual, invading the country on the pretext of a war instead might hide your purpose but will not hinder the natives’ determination to kick your teeth in.

If the villain is powerful enough to start a war, is he in a position of enough power that he doesn’t have to hide his motives? He might well be. The excessive concern for what the public might think is largely a relic of a) times when mass communication is available, thus transmitting information more quickly than happens in your typical fantasy world, and b) times when the public is seen as having power, which would be less likely in a monarchical government. (Of course, if both of those things are true in your fantasy world, then you could have a lot of fun with a villain who has to offer soothing lies to the press). The villain is more likely to have to lie to the people immediately in power around him rather than everyone in the entire world.

This could actually work to your protagonist’s advantage, as well as for the betterment of your plot by obviating the necessity for a villain monologue. Say your protagonist is part of a group traditionally considered unimportant by her society. If the villain doesn’t bother to hide his power or his plan from that group, that might make her all the more determined to stop him.

Villain monologues irritate me for the same reason that idiot plots do: there’s no reason for them to exist, not when you have so many interesting tricks to avoid them.

Book review post for April (part 1)

2008-04-29T02:05:56Z

Haven’t done one of these in a long time, so I’ve got a lot of novels to cover; I’ll do another post sometime soon.

COMMENTS HAVE SPOILERS FOR DUST

George Meredith, One of Our Conquerors

Where do you start with this one?

Okay. The basic story: Victor Radnor is a successful businessman whose main activity, when he’s not brokering deals, arranging musical gatherings, and being proud of his daughter, is waiting for his wife to die. He married Mrs. Burman, about twenty years his senior, to get hold of her money. Then he fell in love with her young companion, Nataly, and they eloped together. Of course, the little problem of Victor’s first marriage means that they’re living together without benefit of holy matrimony. Their daughter, Nesta, has no idea she’s illegitimate—but every time Victor tries to set up their household in a socially acceptable neighborhood, the rumors find them, and Nataly is tormented by them. Now he’s built a new house, Lakelands, and Nataly is horribly worried the same thing will happen all over again, just as Nesta is being courted. Victor remains confident that Mrs. Burman will die any moment now and set them all free.

The style of this novel is tortured, possibly on purpose; Meredith wrote it when he was in his sixties and had just achieved popular success after thirty years’ hard labor as a writer and editor, and he badly wanted to say, “Take that!” to the critics who had always complained about the way he wrote. So the first sentence of the novel, describing Victor slipping on an orange peel, goes: “A gentleman, noteworthy for a lively countenance and a waistcoat to match it, crossing London Bridge at noon on a gusty April day, was almost magically detached from his conflict with the gale by some sly strip of slipperiness, abounding in that conduit of the markets, which had more or less adroitly performed the trick upon preceding passengers, and now laid this one flat amid the shuffle of feet, peaceful for the moment as the uncomplaining who have gone to Sabrina beneath the tides.” Nesta, whose nickname is Fredi, appears this way: “Upon the opening of the door, there was a cascade of muslin downstairs. His darling Fredi stood out of it, a dramatic Undine.” And so on.

Meredith is also both allusive and elusive. Most of the really important scenes take place off-stage. Blink and you’ll miss a reference to a character’s emotions or hidden problems, or possibly mistake the real thing for a metaphor. Because a large part of the novel shares Victor’s perspective on the other characters, it took me a while to realize exactly what sort of pain Nataly’s silence concealed. Meredith’s major theme is how marriages (and courtships) fall apart, because he believed men and women were both so deformed by the inequality of the sexes that they could not recognize or understand each other. And that’s what’s happening here. Do not read One of Our Conquerors for happy fun times.

I would say it’s a good novel and worth the work. But I have read fourteen Meredith novels. I am biased.

Justine Larbalestier, Magic or Madness

Reason Cansino, at fifteen years old, has spent most of her life on the run around Australia with her mother, fleeing from her evil witch of a grandmother, Esmeralda. But now her mother has gone mad, and Reason is committed to Esmeralda’s care. She quickly starts discovering that the magic her mother described as “light and mirrors” is slightly more than that.

One thing that impressed me about this book was the sense of darkness in it. Reason’s perspective is, in a way, innocent, since she’s grown up out of cities and away from most popular culture, and she’s a bit scornful of people who can’t look at a wall and immediately count how many stones it contains, or recite the Fibonacci sequence in their heads. But there are unsettling clues that keep showing up just at the moment where you think Reason’s following a false trail. The truth about the other characters is not identical with what Reason thinks, but neither is it identical with the thoughts of the two more “experienced” teenage narrators in the book, Esmeralda’s next-door-neighbor Tom and the New York runaway J.T. Magic isn’t an escape into a land full of unicorns. There are multiple prices to be paid for it. And the ending is a cliffhanger that probably wouldn’t work for everyone, but which immediately made me want to read on.

There were other things I enjoyed, too: Reason being into mathematics, and the fact that she isn’t completely white (her father was an Aborigine).

However, I also felt like there was a lot missing from the story. There’s an antagonist who’s obviously terrible, but the truth about him remains shadowy enough to dilute the fear, even when we’re in the head of J.T., who knows the most. Reason is a transparent narrator, perhaps because she’s written in first person; Tom and J.T. seem to hold back on things they really have no reason not to think about for the sake of maintaining the book’s mystery. This eventually drove me nuts. And it’s a trick that I usually like and respect when other narratives use it.

I also found it hard, at some points, to care about what happened to Reason. She’s competent and wise and street-smart, but then she gets manipulated endlessly by the people around her. And there are several long stretches of the story where the reader has knowledge Reason doesn’t, thanks to the other narrators, so it’s a process of waiting for her to catch up. That, in turn, lessens the force of her epiphanies on the reader when they do come. I really think this is a book that would have benefited from being written in just one viewpoint.

Elizabeth Bear, Dust

Set on a crippled colony ship, the Jacob’s Ladder, rotating around two stars about to explode, Dust has an awful lot of the medieval romance about it. There are literal knights (post-humans, some with wings), angels (the remnants of a superintelligent AI that broke up at some point in the distant past), courts, and peasants (people without the genetic and nanotechnological benefits the post-humans possess). The story begins with the capture of a knight named Perceval by Ariane, who virtually controls the court of Rule; Ariane cut off Perceval’s wings after she surrendered. Rien, a servant girl in Rule, is assigned to take care of Perceval until the moment Ariane is ready to consume her memories and her nanotechnology. Perceval reveals that she and Rien are half-sisters. Rien frees her, and they set off on a quest across the world.

I will say that the world is extremely cool. I don’t think it’s truly a successful attempt to blend SF and fantasy, but if you really like medieval romance, stories about generational ships, or both, Dust is worth your time. There are also a few engaging minor characters—Gavin, the blowtorch that has formed itself into the shape of a basilisk, is one—and some of the meetings between estranged characters trying to figure out how to fit into one another’s lives have a realistic awkwardness.

But from my viewpoint, Dust took three of the things I found irritating in Bear’s other novels and mixed them with two new irritating things that left me unsure why I kept reading. The first three irritations are the lack of emotional connection with the characters and everybody turning out to be related to everybody from Blood and Iron, and the convoluted, hard-to-follow politics from Carnival. The fourth is what I find to be an extremely problematic handling of sexual orientation. I literally cannot say more about that without getting into spoilers that will destroy the end of the book for you.

The fifth is a sense of randomness about some of the revelations included. At one point Rien encounters what’s apparently a revered artifact of the ship’s earlier culture. She draws her breath in awe, the scene ends, and when we return to Rien’s viewpoint, she has abandoned all thought of that artifact. The only other references to it are in a few chapter epigraphs. Its significance is never explained. Maybe it’ll be explained in the next few books of the trilogy. At the moment, it’s just a random shard of glass in the book’s stainless steel world.

If the book sounds interesting, you might want to read it. I’m completely the wrong audience for it.

Tanith Lee, A Heroine of the World

What a weird book.

No, seriously, what a weird book. This book is about Aradia, the daughter of a kingdom defeated in war. When the conquering enemy overruns her city, she’s taken as a concubine by the general who moves into her aunt’s house, and from there carried off to his northern country. Along the way, there is rape, death, pregnancy, forced marriage, constant danger, truly creepy sexual harassment, true love, and beautiful description.

I think it’s the last combined with everything else in the novel that led to the overwhelming feeling of oddness as I was reading it. A Heroine of the World is about what probably would happen to a young woman—when the story starts, Aradia is 13—caught up in war and conquest in a fantasy world where women have neither social status or something else like magic to even the scales with men. Aradia is not a trained warrior; she’s extremely naïve in the political realities of the world; she’s religious in the absolute worst way; she has recognizable trauma and depression, to the point that reading some of her sections made me want to curl up and die. So she’s a pawn for most of the narrative. She takes some actions, one at least that changes the whole course of the story, but they’re always small and don’t do much good in the short term, or sometimes in the long term either. Most of the men she meets try to victimize her. Lee is more brutal toward her heroine than Martin is toward his. If A Song of Ice and Fire makes you want to start looking for a razor blade and a nice warm bath, avoid A Heroine of the World at all costs.

But along the way, Lee is describing everything beautifully, especially the estate Aradia’s first husband owns. She actually managed to make me interested in the clothes and the makeup the female characters wear; I literally cannot remember the last time a book did that. So the horror is tucked inside glittering sentences, which don’t really muffle it but make it possible to go on reading.

This book is weird.

Writing character clash stories

2008-03-03T02:15:28Z

In the past, I’ve written rants about how I like stories where the plot forms naturally from the clash of characters’ personalities, as opposed to characters compelled against their wills by an outside force (destiny, a prophecy, the gods, unspeakably evil and inhuman villains, etc.) But how, exactly, do you achieve a character clash story? Especially when it’s so much easier to steal a set of tropes and plot devices from a famous or archetypal story and just use them instead?

1) Give the characters a shared center which is not a person. For example, they can all be part of the same group—a large dynastic family, a village or a town, a group of priestesses in a temple (oooh!) Or they can all have the same goal—ruling the country (this is what makes A Song of Ice and Fire work in its introductory pages), raising a group of children, preventing the alchemist that lives down the streets from buying any goods in any of the shops until he takes a shower and stops smelling like a slaughterhouse. Or they can all live in the same place—village, town, large floating island rotating around a sun and hovering above an abyss—even if they’re not part of the same group.

Advantages:

-They have a natural reason to be together, and this prevents you from relying on an external force (honestly, at this point I cannot take the group of mismatched adventurers that come together to protect the hero because prophecy says they should seriously) or a series of improbable coincidences.
-They have multitudes of personal relationships that you can give weight and depth, but they’re still rotating around one center that connects them.
-It keeps the plot centralized as well, and prevents you from flying off to obscure corners of the fantasy world to lovingly detail apparently unimportant and unconnected plotlines, one of the more pressing sins of epic fantasy.
-Know why they’re together, and you’ve got some of the details of your worldbuilding already decided.

Now, why do I think you should prevent these characters from rotating around a person, like an heir to the throne or a savior of the world? Because, too often, that turns the characters who rotate into literal satellites of the hero, existing only to answer his whims or be one-dimensional bullies and jealous siblings. Also, I have a philosophical objection to stories where a person is the center of the universe. I think it makes for bad writing and wish-fulfillment. Most of your characters should be the center of their own universes, and if they’re not, there should be a reason why not. Exiling the Divine Child from your worldview and giving a multitude of people a partial hold on the story leads to more, and more fully developed, personalities

2) Know what they want. This is good characterization advice for protagonists, and it’s to them that it most often gets applied. Think about it, and you can probably answer the question of what the central characters of most stories you’ve read want. (Unless the author is simply muddled or is writing one of those stories where false modesty prevents the hero/ine from seizing the power or acclaim or wondrous life that any sane person would take in a heartbeat. Have I mentioned I really hate reluctant hero stories?)

But with a personality clash story, you need to know what everybody wants. I would say, “At least all your viewpoint characters,” but it’s best if you know what the important secondary characters want, too, so their dialogue and their actions relative to the narrators make sense. And those motivations need to make sense. The characters should not be convenient plot devices which exist solely for the sake of giving the heroes an important epiphany or acting as a reward for said heroes. (I also hate Designated Love Interests).

Really, each character should have an inner subjectivity, or the illusion of an inner subjectivity. Even if you did come up with a character in the first place just because the plot needed him/her, make them more than that. Flesh them out; give them depth and richness. Because that’s the kind of story a character clash plot demands.

3) Keep in mind that people can change, and by reason of their experience. So a major protagonist may start the story believing that the best way to train a child in sword-fighting is simply making them do the same things over and over until they get it right, and then change her mind because she ruins a talented protégée of hers doing that. That’s a fairly simple example, but it illustrates another principle of the character-clash story in miniature: people have minds, and those minds, acting on each other, change themselves and each other.

This is what I like most about a character clash story. A large portion of its plot is mental (see point 4), but the mental action causes physical action. The characters speak out or treat people differently or go back and do their best to repair a mistake. Or they harden their attitudes or don’t act because of shame or fear or indifference, and that causes a tragedy. There aren’t external forces declaring that, say, Xavier has to die just to teach Princess Carnimissima about the value of life.

Of course, people shouldn’t change their minds for no reason, either. This is another point in favor of tracking characters’ motivations. If you want an important secondary character who started out as the protagonist’s rival to become her friend, you need something more than the most-used tactic (the rival deciding that the protagonist was really better at their shared skill or shared goal all along). I mean, why? The rival has no reason to admit that even if she’s suspected it—and if she knew it all along and was willing to admit it all along, it would make the rivalry look pretty damned stupid. She does have every reason to continue working at her own skill, to goad or irritate the protagonist so she falters, or to sabotage the protagonist. It doesn’t make the rivalry evolving into friendship impossible; it just means that you have to think harder about the transition. Maybe the protagonist admits the rival’s better.

Letting the plot follow naturally from the changes of mind eliminates the necessity for inventing flimsy justifications.

4) Make the mental plot dynamic and interesting. Yes, the words are so easy to type, aren’t they? But it can be done. And it can be done without tumbling into the trap of internal monologue, too.

What’s the problem with most internal monologues in fantasy? That’s right, they go nowhere and they are full of mindless repetition. If the heir to the throne was worrying about her ability to take and hold the throne on page 20, she’s still worrying about the same damn thing on page 300, without taking any action to make it happen. Or, at least, the actions taken appear to have no connection to her angst.

So that’s what you want to do: connect the mental dynamics and the physical ones. Show the protagonists deciding on a course of action and then using it. Maybe the course of action is wrong, so they analyze why it didn’t work, come up with another one that suits the changed circumstances, and use that one instead.

Or show a character who’s not naturally introspective given a stunning blow. Maybe a person whose opinion she’s always valued expresses open contempt for her. She has to decide what she’s going to do about that. The solution is not to freeze her psychology and just have her angst endlessly, taking no step forwards or back. She can begin the long and painful process of withdrawing her admiration from this person. She can begin the equally long and painful process of reevaluating herself, if she thinks the derision has some merit. She can decide to go ask someone else, a neutral judge.

And then she goes and does it.

A character clash plot needs this intersection of mental steps and physical ones. If someone angsts in silence, no one else can respond to her problem in any way, and there is no further development of anyone’s personality or agenda relative to that character. And then your plot stalls, too.

5) Build in redundancies. By this, I don’t mean duplicates of the same character. Nonexistent gods, how boring. I do mean characters with similar motivations, or speaking styles, or worldviews, or experiences, or backgrounds.

Why?

Do this, and you have natural rivals, natural friends, natural tentative allies, natural enemies. You have natural second chances for other characters who may have made spectacular mistakes trying to talk to or court or befriend the first person, but can hopefully learn from those mistakes and do better when they meet the second. You have people who represent different, nuanced takes on one general principle (such as vengeance, justice, faith, love). You can have people who, even though they do have similar experiences, have extraordinarily different personalities, widening both the plot possibilities and your own range of writing. You can include multiple genders, sexualities, races, classes, degrees of able-bodiedness, so that your writing is less likely to depend on tokenism and more likely (though not guaranteed) to offer a more balanced view of the groups in question.

You can also more easily create that illusion of inner subjectivity that’s going to be so important for a plot like this. A character who doesn’t get as many chances for fleshing out can seem deeper than she is because she resembles a fully fledged secondary character or protagonist; she borrows reality from them.

So those are all really good reasons.

Kage Baker, Race, and Gender (contains mild spoilers for the Company series)

2008-02-24T22:41:44Z

It's bothersome. I already bought all ten books in the Company series, and I really do like the style of humor and the narrative drive behind the plot, so you'd think I'd zip right through them. But I'm stuck in the ninth one.

The Company series is SF, set mostly on Earth with a few trips to the Moon and Mars, and mostly in historical periods. (The future in Baker's world only goes up to 2355, after which something unknown and probably awful will happen). The Company is Dr. Zeus, a group of investors and scientists that perfected immortality- but it will only work on children- and time travel- but you can't bring any objects out of their own time forwards. So the Company makes its money by finding orphans, turning them into immortal cyborgs, programming them to want to preserve art treasures, endangered species, and the like, and then having them hide away treasures in safe places so that they can be "rediscovered" at the right time to make Dr. Zeus rich. Since the Company has the Temporal Concordance and knowledge of every historically recorded event up to 2355, and no one can change history, it's extremely hard to fight them. Some of the cyborgs- particularly the main characters, Botanist Mendoza and Facilitator Joseph- try anyway. The series has a lot of adventure, a lot of hopping back and forth in time and between places, and some genuinely affecting drama and emotional moments. (The ending of book four, The Graveyard Game, is my favorite gut punch in the series so far).

I started getting bothered with the colonization issues in book two, Sky Coyote, where Joseph, Mendoza, and several others are assigned to collect a native Californian tribe for Dr. Zeus. The white characters (and nearly all the cyborgs are white) are so damn condescending and exploitative of the natives' legends- Joseph dresses up as Coyote in order to con them, for example- and it isn't really suggested that this is wrong, though the mortal scientists' enslavement of the cyborgs is certainly made a moral issue. But it's only up to book 9, Gods and Pawns, where I am now, that I really saw how disturbing the overall pattern is.

Most of the cyborgs are white, as mentioned. The very few characters of color divide into a) those who are mentioned but never appear on screen, b) stereotypes (a mammy to an all-important white male child, for example) and c) those who seem to be portrayed more equally but have only a secondary role in the plot. Also, there's a tendency to describe the major character of color (a West African woman) as an ebony figurine, etc. Narrative drive and action rests almost exclusively with the white male characters, for both good and evil.

That's another thing. Out of the dozens and dozens of cyborg characters mentioned so far, only about seven of the prominent ones are women. Two of these pine away for love and act only to save the men they love, one plays a prostitute in her most extensive appearance and acts like a bubbly airhead in the other, another is the mammy, a fifth uses sex to manipulate everyone around her, etc. Mendoza is a female character with unique abilities and, at least nominally, the center of the story, but since she's one of those who only acts on behalf of and because of the man she loves, this is less effective than it otherwise might be. Joseph, the white male (of course) Facilitator who recruited her, does three times as much and does not passively resign himself to his fate, as Mendoza has a habit of doing for large portions of the series.

It's too bad, because I really do like the plot in these books. It moves along! It's connected! It's complex and ties back to itself! (I value that all the more because it's one of the qualities I read epic fantasy for, but other qualities inherent to the epic fantasy genre keep me from liking those books now). But the race and gender politics bother me to the point that I haven't felt like picking up Gods and Pawns in a week- and since I'm in the middle of a story where Mendoza and a white male character investigate the secrets of a native Bolivian tribe, I'm not really sure I want to finish.

How to let your protagonist make mistakes

2008-01-14T21:30:54Z

The title should be descriptive enough in and of itself, but just in case: I’ve said an awful lot about how authors should allow their protagonists to make mistakes more often and not simply know “intuitively” or “somehow” what the right thing to do is. But I appreciate that a protagonist who does so can look awfully stupid.

1) Give the protagonist limited access to information, for a good reason. I’m currently reading Judith Berman’s Bear Daughter; the main character is Cloud, who was born a bear, but abruptly becomes a girl one day. She continually tries to learn more information about her bear father and exactly what happened when he kidnapped Thrush, her human mother. Since no one knows why she became human and her relatives are still in mourning for the men who died trying to rescue Thrush, they’re reluctant to tell her what she wants to know. Thus Cloud makes mistakes when she gets tossed into the wider world. A very large chunk of knowledge about her own past that most human children in her culture get the chance to absorb simply isn’t there.

This is the kind of plot that can actually work well with a child or a teenage protagonist, but also with adults. Someone who’s been in exile, is low in status but suddenly achieves social mobility, or could present danger to others with a little knowledge might also be cut out of the loop believably. And, of course, they’re going to stumble headlong when they come up on one of the unanticipated gaps in their conception of the world.

How do you differentiate good reasons to hide knowledge from bad ones? First of all, the time reason (“We don’t have time to tell you what you want to know right now”) is generally crap, because most of the time the author doesn’t actually engage the characters in constant high-speed running from the enemy. Second, the knowledge has to be actively painful or dangerous or sensitive; why should anyone care if the protagonist knows her grandmother had blue eyes or not, unless that is somehow significant? Third, it’s better when the protagonist has no means to force someone else to answer her questions, as a child or servant wouldn’t have. Just getting dragged along in sullen silence and not asking questions at all is dumb, and worse, passive.

2) Create a situation where anyone would be out of their depth. That’s the situation of Lilith Iyapo in Octavia Butler’s Dawn. She’s informed that the Oankali, aliens who have preserved the remnants of humanity in suspension after a devastating world war, are going to breed with humans, no ifs, ands, or buts. She’s assigned to awaken other humans and introduce them to their new overlords. She makes mistakes about who the best people to wake up are, even with access to their life histories, because this is a completely new situation for everyone.

This is, I think, probably the best way to show your protagonist being mistaken, for all sorts of reasons:

-it involves thinking about the plot as well as the character
-it allows other people to make mistakes as well
-it allows your protagonist to make some right guesses, if only because of chance (Lilith, for instance, manages to correctly predict a few people’s reactions)
-it shows how admirable character traits might develop as the protagonist struggles to deal with the situation

I think this one isn’t used more often simply because of the very strong bias to have the protagonist triumph completely no matter what. Prolonged struggles and compromised victories are often not on the agenda. Well, they should be; they’re more interesting stories and less likely to be wish-fulfillment than the story where the protagonist goes forth against “impossible odds” but does everything right from the beginning.

3) Build a tendency to a certain sort of mistake into your protagonist’s personality. Another book I recently finished reading is Tanith Lee’s White as Snow, a retelling of “Snow White.” Arpazia, the evil queen figure, is both ignorant because of her sheltered upbringing and so self-absorbed that no one else is really real to her. Thus she continually alienates other people. Her daughter, Coira, has some of the same problems, but overcomes them because she can more easily open her self to others and accept that she’s not the most important thing in the world.

If your protagonist is proud of her intelligence, she may very well propose a clever solution to a problem, and then be astonished when she tries to apply that solution and it doesn’t work because of other forces she figured to take into account. (This is a sort of mistake that I’m very familiar with from my time in academia). If she’s obsessed with going on a quest to find her kidnapped friend, she could ignore short-term “distractions” that might actually advance her goal in the long term. If she has to work with someone she finds distasteful, she might set out to prove that person a fraud in hopes of getting them dismissed, only to find out that her colleague is actually a good person but has been disgusted by her automatic distrust. (This is the sort of mistake where the protagonist is equalizing “I don’t like her” to “She’s evil.”)

This strategy might be easier for many writers, as they do generally agree that their protagonists have to have flaws. Now what needs to happen is the consistent treatment of flaws as flaws, rather than just opportunities to make other people laugh indulgently.

4) Set up several conflicting attitudes towards and explanations of the protagonist’s actions. The most powerful of these in Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow are, respectively, the notion that everything in the story is ordained by God, and the notion that the failures—the collapse of a Jesuit mission to a planet named Rakhat that’s found to be inhabited and the deaths of seven of the eight people involved in the mission—are simply the result of blind caprice and chance. The main character, Emilio Sandoz, believes in God’s will for most of the book, but his faith is challenged and challenged and challenged again until it shatters. Yet other characters remain convinced that he’s a martyr or a saint. That these same characters often die randomly and horribly adds more weight to the other side. The reader is left with differing rationales according to which Sandoz can either be blamed or exculpated from blame.

This is probably the most delicate way of creating mistakes for your protagonist to make. For one thing, there has to be actual evidence in the book that things can be interpreted more than one way. If everything is clearly the result of Destiny in this world and only an idiot would believe in free will or that the prophecy would not be fulfilled, why should the reader? (And thus we arrive at the core of my problem with every story that uses Destiny but tries to show the hero as making important choices). For another, you have to go for important mistakes. If two characters argue about their opposing principles and inflict psychic damage on each other as their relationship collapses because neither will compromise, the author has to show that those principles are vital to the characters involved. A simple healing kiss or surrender of principles by one of the characters later, or—my least favorite—a loophole according to which they’re “both” right, simply implies that the mistake wasn’t really a mistake and all the angst about it wasn’t justified.

Russell chooses several important issues for her protagonist as the core of her story: the problem of faith, the death of everyone else on the mission, the apparent betrayal by Sandoz of his vow of celibacy, and the murder of a child at Sandoz’s hands. Without these, and seeing how they came to happen, The Sparrow would be much less powerful.

Yet More Book Reviews

2007-12-14T15:40:23Z

Octavia Butler, The Xenogenesis Trilogy

These three books--Dawn, Adulthood Rites, and Imago--follow what happens to humanity in the wake of a world war that destroyed most of the species, after which an alien race called the Oankali found them. The Oankali have tentacles, three genders, extremely advanced genetic science, and a biological imperative to mix their genes with any intelligent carbon-based life-form they find. They put humans into suspended animation, study them for two centuries, and finally choose the one they think best suited to represent them and their plans to other humans: a young African-American woman named Lilith Iyapo. Lilith doesn’t understand the Oankali at first (she never completely does) and the other humans hate her and think of her as a traitor. Because the Oankali have modified the human survivors to be sterile if they don’t mate with Oankali, all resistance will die out eventually.

Dawn is Lilith’s story; Adulthood Rites and Imago are stories about her children, some of the first human-Oankali “constructs” to be born. There’re all sorts of interesting gender ideas going on here. For example, Oankali consider human males to be much more violent than human women, so it’s a long time before they permit Lilith to have a son. Human men and women mated to Oankali have to relate through the ooloi, the third Oankali gender, since after the mating they can’t touch each other without feeling an intense disgust. Humans are both incredibly repulsed, thanks to appearance, and deeply attracted, thanks to scent, to ooloi, who can heal any disease and lengthen human lifespans but are just as likely to play around with your genes. Some of the humans manage to grasp that ooloi are a third gender, neither male nor female; others don’t.

I enjoyed these books. I’m always interested in stories of humans and nonhumans coexisting, and the Xenogenesis trilogy is unsparing, as is most of Butler’s fiction, in depicting just how hard it would be. The humans are, of course, understandable in their outrage against the Oankali; on the other hand, the Oankali can literally foresee, thanks to genetic patterns, that humans will just doom themselves to war and eventual extinction again if they’re left alone, so they feel justified in interfering.

Joan Slonczewski, A Door Into Ocean

This book concentrates on two planets, or technically a planet, Valedon, and its “moon,” Shora, which is completely covered with water. The inhabitants of Shora, the Sharers, are all female, and are in fact incapable of heterosexual sex anymore. They also have webbed fingers, no hair, and purple skins, thanks to “breathmicrobes” that grow on them and allow them to retain oxygen underwater. Valedon has ignored them for a long time, but now the inhabitants have become aware that the Sharers might possess dangerous genetic science, and so they invade. Except that the Sharers have never had a war, and so they don’t react to the invasion the way anyone expected.

This is already one of my favorite science fiction books. I love books that concentrate on ecology and the clash of cultural mindsets, and both are strong themes in A Door Into Ocean. The Valedon soldiers keep trying to force the Sharers to act like the terrorists and guerilla warriors they’re used to, and it simply doesn’t happen—and the reasons for its not happening make sense. And the individual people from Valedon who go among the Sharers out of curiosity or love tend to become more like them, not the other way around. They’ve got a better culture than Valedon’s, not perfect and not without problems and conflict, but smarter, saner, more limited, and more balanced.

I did think there was one moment late in the book when the plot seemed to jar, and suddenly certain characters were losing their interest in the war for reasons I couldn’t discern. I’m still not sure if there was something earlier in the book that explained this or not. I’d like to read it again to find out. Not that this is a hardship.

Joanna Russ, To Write Like a Woman: Essays in Feminism and Science Fiction

I picked this book up originally because it had several essays in it that looked interesting as outside critical material for the feminist science fiction class I’m teaching, but it’s extremely entertaining in and of itself; I read the whole thing through in one sitting.

Only some of the essays are on science fiction, including one on feminist utopias and one on war-of-the-sexes stories; others are on individual authors, such as Willa Cather, or different genres, such as the Gothic. (The one on the Gothic has the wonderful title, “Someone’s Trying to Kill Me and I Think It’s My Husband”). The critical perspective taken on them is feminist, of course, but a much clearer and less jargon-preoccupied feminism than I’m used to seeing in English academia.

The essay that most inspired and enraged me, though, is the seventh, “What Can a Heroine Do? or Why Women Can’t Write.” It’s an examination of basic story structures and how the “exciting” and “normal” ones all, without exception, assume a male character at the center. The heroine gets to be the heroine of a Love Story, and that’s it. Trying to make her the center of an ordinarily male-oriented narrative results in failure in the audience’s eyes, because “success in male terms is failure for a woman, a “fact” movies, books, and television plays have been earnestly proving to us for decades” (83). Trying to use exclusively male characters means a writer “ignores the whole experience of the female culture (a very different one from the official, male culture), all her specifically erotic experiences, and a good deal of her own history” (85). The female writer can use lyric narratives, as Virginia Woolf did in Mrs. Dalloway, or build off her own experience, which usually leads male critics to call the resulting book “structureless.” The solution Russ focuses on is to invent new myths that will put women in the center. This essay says a lot of what I’ve been trying to think about concerning female-centered narratives, and much more clearly and coherently.

George Meredith novels

George Meredith is a British Victorian author, one of those I’m studying for my dissertation, but I’m more familiar with his poetry than novels. In the last few months, I’ve read several of his novels.

The Shaving of Shagpat is a fantasy, Meredith’s only, based on the Arabian Nights. The evil, hairy clothier Shagpat has a magical hair called the Identical on his head, which makes everyone who sees him bow down to him. The semi-heroic barber Shibli Bagarag is destined to shave Shagpat and end his power. First, though, he has to acquire magic, and then a sword sharp enough to shave Shagpat, and find love with the beautiful Noorna bin Noorka, a wise sorceress who advises him on his quest. This is made more difficult because Shibli is vain, a braggart, and not a little stupid, so he keeps disobeying Noorna’s orders and getting trapped, enchanted, and stripped of his acquired magic. Also, the narrative is highly archaic—“Now, things were in that condition with Shibli Bagarag, that on a certain day he was hungry and abject, and the city of Shagpat the clothier was before him; so he made toward it, deliberating as to how he should procure a meal, for he had not a dirhem in his girdle, and the remembrance of great dishes and savoury ingredients were to him as the illusion of rivers sheening on the sands to travellers gasping with thirst”—and it keeps turning aside into poetry and parables that are longer than some of the individual chapters. The Shaving of Shagpat isn’t a novel so much as a romance, and though I enjoyed it, it’s really, really hard to enjoy if you’re not prepared to put up with Meredith violating the strictures of novel-writing whenever he wants.

The Egoist is Meredith’s most famous novel, and with good reason. Sir Willoughby Patterne has already been jilted once, so he’s determined to hang onto his second fiancée, Clara Middleton. Clara quickly discovers, however, that he’s such a monstrous egoist he’ll essentially devour her alive and leave nothing of her own imagination and consciousness behind. But because Sir Willoughby seems to be such a perfect match, no one else can see this, and they treat Clara’s objections to the marriage as ridiculous. The Egoist follows Clara’s attempts to get help and make other people understand exactly what Sir Willoughby is. It’s more than three-quarters psychology, concerning internal changes in the various characters as they side with or against Clara. Once again, it violates the rules of good narrative, plot, and even grammar. Once again, it’s extremely hard to understand at some points. Once again, I enjoyed it thoroughly.

The Amazing Marriage’s main character is Carinthia Kirby, daughter of an amazing marriage herself, whom the Earl of Fleetwood promises to marry. Because the Earl of Fleetwood always keeps his promises, he grimly marries her, even though he doesn’t love her. Carinthia attempts to live with her husband, who rejects her, and changes slowly from the dutiful girl who only wanted her husband’s heart into a woman who clearly sees what the Earl is and rejects him. By the time she’s saved his life, proven herself more capable than he is to deal with striking Welsh miners, and made arrangements to defend her son from his father, she’s become one of the most engaging female characters I’ve read in a Victorian novel. The Amazing Marriage isn’t perfect, especially in the characterization of the secondary characters, but it’s my favorite of the Meredith novels I’ve read, because of the way it follows every bit of the dissolution of a marriage and points out exactly why the partners involved don’t understand each other.

Rant on anti-heroes

2007-12-13T16:05:18Z

A few people asked for a rant on anti-heroes. This is a collection of thoughts loosely organized around that topic.

1) Moral ambiguity or not? Supposedly, an anti-hero is someone who’s a major character in a story and yet takes morally ambiguous actions—or at least actions that don’t tend to fit under what a reader thinks of as “heroic.”

So what happens if an “anti-hero” only kills people who are shown to totally deserve it, or if her use of torture is preceded by seven arguments that show (at least to the author) why it’s justified in this case, or if he brags that he doesn’t care about anybody and yet he cares for a helpless innocent orphan child as soon as he gets the chance?

I don’t think those are anti-heroes. I think those are normal protagonists whom the author is trying to cushion, as authors usually do, against ever making a mistake.

If you have an anti-hero whom you want to make morally ambiguous, you have to give up most of the moral justifications. An anti-hero may well have set up his or her own moral codes, but they’re not going to match the usual definition of “good.” And his or her actions have to run the risk of being objectionable; otherwise, the author is just flirting with or teasing the audience with the specter of immorality.

I would consider Roland Deschain, from Stephen King’s Dark Tower series, an anti-hero, at least in the early part of the series, because he lets nothing get in the way of his quest for the Dark Tower. The narrative puts an obstacle in his path that most authors would use as an opportunity to demonstrate their protagonist’s innate compassion; Roland doesn’t take the bait. (I’m avoiding spoilers here, but if you’ve read The Gunslinger, you know what I mean). On the other hand, I don’t think Locke Lamora, from Scott Lynch’s series, is an anti-hero, because the justification of all his actions is carefully planted in the narrative. Though he’s a thief, he only steals from nobles who “deserve” it. When he becomes violent, it’s for the sake of friends. And so on.

So, consider. What exactly is the degree of moral ambiguity you’re going to permit your anti-hero? Is it real complexity, or just a way of escaping unpunished from actions that would earn severe disapproval in the real world? Is it truly a choice between two evils, or a choice between an evil and a right thinly disguised, with the character always choosing the right? If the character claims to pursue an ethic of self-interest or choosing the greatest good for the greatest number, does she actually do so, or does she flinch when it comes time to put it to the test? (Though I despise the philosophy of the greatest good for the greatest number, I think it would be interesting to see a fantasy character who actually took this to its logical extremes. Where it shows up, though, it always means rescuing the heroes of the book, while the sacrifice-oriented mentors or guardians kill off unimportant side characters).

2) What traits does your protagonist lack? For an anti-hero, I think this is at least as important as deciding what they’re actually like. Otherwise, you’ll turn out to have a hero the moment you stop keeping an eye on the little buggers.

For example, here’s a list of some traits that fantasy heroes often have:

Courage
Compassion for everyone around them
An open mind (this goes back to the fact that overtly racist/sexist hero/ines are very rare, even when it would make them fit better within their culture)
Drive to achieve some goal that is not simply personal (personal ambition is Bad)
A conviction that they are unworthy or unsuited to their chosen task or any honors that they earn (self-confidence and self-esteem are likewise Bad)
Skill in speaking, even when they think they’re fools
Very strong personal bonds, such as friendships and love affairs
Loyalty
Ability to perform the (seemingly) impossible
A dislike of change, hence the amount of heroes who end up restoring the “good” status quo at the end of the story
Exaggerated sensations of angst and guilt

So, let’s say you go through that list and decide that your anti-hero is going to be a coward, extremely self-interested, unequal to persuading other people to join her with her words alone, and prone to double-crossing people when it works. And she stays true to those characteristics. She isn’t loyal to someone who can’t benefit her, she runs away from fights, she abandons a group goal to concentrate on her own, and she isn’t an eloquent speaker; she just hands over money to hire help.

Already you can see that this is going to be a very different story from one about a completely heroic heroine, or even one about a heroine who starts out thinking she’s self-interested and then changes her mind halfway through the book, usually because she adopts a child.

The trick becomes keeping an audience’s interest, because one thing true anti-heroes do is turn some people off.

3) Make them like his other traits. A lot of anti-heroes have senses of gallows humor and cunning that allow them to get revenge on their enemies, because that makes them more amusing to read about. And certainly, if you’re writing about an anti-hero, especially one whose career puts him in danger quite often, you could do worse than this.

I think an ordinary, limited person also makes a fine anti-hero. She won’t have the killer magic or the incredible skill with weapons that often gets the normal heroine out of trouble. She may not be able to sweet-talk her way out of there, either. Instead, she has to figure out what thing within her power to offer her captors when she’s thrown in a jail cell and told she’ll be executed tomorrow morning. This exercise is good for the author’s brain, because it gets them out of the “normal” pathways of heroics, and it’s good for the audience, so that they can see what clever thing the author will come up with next.

Or you can have someone who’s an excellent psychologist, in the “reading people” sense of the term. She could get out of trouble, survive, and punish her enemies by manipulating people, playing them against each other, and destroying relationships from the inside by her knowledge of the partners’ fears and jealousies.

Anti-heroes may not be very nice people, but they can still be interesting.

4) Make this anti-hero a normal citizen of her culture. Say you’ve constructed a fantasy culture with many fine artistic and scientific achievements, but it’s still not a utopia, and it doesn’t hold to many of the cherished ideals of Western liberalism. (Notice that I said “ideals,” not “realities”). So you have slavery, or open persecution and discrimination against a racial or religious or linguistic minority, or constant class warfare. Fantasy heroes are usually fighting to change this—not by revolution as such, but by restoring some older status quo, like a legendary kingdom, where things were better for more people.

A fantasy anti-hero might exist as happily in this culture as a fish in water, and oppose any struggle to change it. After all, why change it? He’s not being hurt, and nor are his interests or the people close to him, and that’s all that matters, right?

The key to writing a story like this, I think, instead of a simplistic one where the rebels are the heroes and the defenders of the status quo are the villains, is to make the justifications of the defenders of the status quo familiar and reasonable-sounding. I’ve found a very good source of arguments like this in listening to American citizens argue about foreign aid, listening to whites argue about racism, and listening to men argue about sexism. Learn how those arguments go; then give them to your anti-hero. You’ve got a person who can do quite horrible things and yet rest easy with herself, because the structure of her beliefs sounds convincing.

5) Give another perspective. The problem with writing solely from an anti-hero’s perspective, especially if it’s first-person, is that it can come to sound as if the anti-hero really is a hero. (It doesn’t help that the author often has that impulse I mentioned above, to cushion the protagonist against making mistakes, and that the audience is often willing to identify the central character as being right no matter what he does).

So write from another perspective. Write from a heroic one, too—but make the hero a minor character instead of the protagonist. When the anti-hero inflicts magical leprosy on a person who once insulted him, that perspective is there to remind the reader how someone outside the anti-hero’s head might view that particular reprisal (that is, as being completely over the top).

6) Stunt certain emotional responses. In the case of the magical leprosy, the responses stunted are reflection and horror. Where a heroine might want to punish someone with a disease for insulting her, but then she’ll stop and reflect and be ashamed of herself, the anti-hero flings the spell and goes about her normal routine, perhaps feeling nothing but a quiet satisfaction.

Anti-heroes have to, I think, be less introspective than heroes, because otherwise the natural tendency is to show them coming around to other points-of-view and questioning themselves, and that almost inevitably leads into a story where they’re not anti-heroes anymore. They’ll probably also lack responses of deep horror, terror, exaltation, love, and other dramatic emotions that many fantasy heroes swing through. They can still feel fear and joy and love, of course. But those emotions won’t rule their lives to the point of driving them to do the impossible or the impossibly risky while ignoring their personal safety, the combination of traits that usually rules when the fantasy hero is performing some heroic act.

Try writing a less introspective character. It’s an interesting challenge, especially if you’ve been accustomed to writing people who did more thinking and talking than doing. If you do want to write an introspective anti-hero, then I think you’ll need the reasonable-sounding arguments I referred to in point 4: he or she will have to have some reason for being able to live with what they’ve done when other people in the society around them disapprove.

Seven more things heroines/female protagonists can do

2007-11-28T02:18:44Z

The title of the rant explains itself, I think. I’ve put “more” in there because I’ve written rants in the past about different ways to diversify female characters, and slashed heroines/female protagonists because of the unfortunate connotation that “heroine” sometimes has.

1) A life in thought. One thing missing from a lot of fantasy novels is philosophy—not morality, since there’s often a clear sense of right and wrong, but the exploration of abstract questions. What is truth like in that world? How is beauty regarded? Knowledge? Wisdom? (Is there a difference between knowledge and wisdom?) Is there a purpose to existence for your invented culture(s), and what is it? What is the philosophy of art?

Even in a society where philosophers don’t exist as a separate profession, class, or guild, I bet there are people doing some thinking about these things. And some of them can be women. Or should be women, since female philosophers are rarely, if ever, central characters in fantasy novels.

Want to use a noblewoman character as your protagonist but have absolutely no idea what to do with her if she’s not involved in a marriage plot? Make her a philosopher! She’ll certainly have time to think that a working-class character probably won’t have, and curiosity makes for a good way to show off the fantasy world. And if she gets into intellectual debates or is forced to defend her ideas, she’ll develop as a thinker in a way that many female protagonists don’t get to.

2) Friendship, complicated and complex. As much as I enjoy reading about and depicting lesbian relationships, I think female friendships (at least, female friendships that are not centered on winning and discussing men) are even rarer in fantasy. They give you all kinds of things to consider. Here are just a few:

-How did these women meet?
-What drove the initial formation of their friendship? Are those factors still around? If so, how have they developed? If not, what kept them friends when the initial common ground turned to mud?
-What wrinkles have their friendships gone through? What really spectacular fights, conflicts of principles, arrival of subjects on which they’ve agreed to disagree?
-How hard do they pull on one another? For example, is one friend always supportive of the other no matter what, because support is what she needs most in her life, or does she smack her friend upside the head regularly and tell her not to be an idiot?
-What do they talk about most often? (This seems to be especially hard for many authors to write about if they want to ban men as a discussion subject).

I’m probably prejudiced, because all the most complex relationships in my life have been friendships, not love affairs. But they’re also less “regulated,” because of the absence of common models in fiction, than relationships like mother-daughter or sister-sister or lover-lover. I always perk up when I see a pair of fictional female friends, because I feel I’m able to expect more variety from them. (Note that this does not tend to happen if their sole subject of conversation is who likes them and who likes-likes them).

3) A truly equal footing. What would it take for a woman in a fantasy society that’s not gender-equal to gain freedom and the ability to form equal relationships with other people? Imagine that the solution is not to become male and abandon everything that makes her female. Maybe she likes some of the things that make her female (and, in any case, deciding that to be “free” a woman has to remain a virgin or never have a child is a limited vision).

So. How does she do it?

It’s going to depend on the circumstances of the society you’ve set up, of course, and the individual qualities and flaws of your protagonist. But say you’ve rejected the “substitute male” and “complete runaway” routes (the first for the reason given above, and the second because it insists that the character has to give up all connections to everybody else). How does she win her freedom without paying a price that’s intolerable to her?

4) Asexuality. By this term, I’m talking about true asexuality, the lack of sexual desire and any longing to engage in a sexual relationship, not a character who’s been scared away from sex by rape or abuse. And yes, male asexual characters are rare, too, but men are more often written as though romantic relationships are unnecessary in their lives—asexuality in practice if not theory. Whereas female characters have to be located in relation to romance the moment they appear on-stage. They’re lesbians, or they’re going to fall in love with the men they’re currently screaming at, or they’re casually bisexual, or she’s had two kids in the past but they’re living with her sister now, or she’s a repressed virgin who just needs to find the right man.

But say that she’s asexual. She just has no interest in any sexual relationships.

Maybe her society has no classification for this, and so other people still try to shove or manipulate her into a sexual category. But this character conceives them all as not mattering to her. She slips out of the categories in her own head, or creates her own. And she doesn’t need to have children or take a lover to be a “real woman.”

Or the author can write her independently of romance whatsoever. If her society is accepting of bisexuality, homosexuality, and polyamory, they could be equally accepting of asexuality. Romance is dispensed with. It does not come up.

Any version of female asexuality could make an interesting story.

5) Changing oneself. The version of this story that I’m most fascinated with is the human who ventures into a nonhuman culture, absorbing their point-of-view, shifting her own attitudes, mentally becoming the alien. But there are other ways to do it:

-The female privileged protagonist who becomes aware of and tries to deal with her own privilege and the consequences of it.
-The heroine whose life changes radically later on, rather than with puberty or as a child, and who has to integrate her sudden magic or destiny or binding to another person into the connections she’s already formed.
-The oppressed/colonized woman who begins to be able to separate her consciousness from the oppression or colonization, and starts the process of changing what she can.
-The woman who’s been hurt and whose life is not suddenly 100% better because a goddess chooses her or a man falls in love with her; she sets her sights on a goal and works towards it, even though complete healing may not be possible.

This requires a lot of introspection, which might be one reason it’s not that popular a plot for fantasy novels. But I think adventure is indeed possible in a story like this; it’s just that it can’t take over and be the sole thing happening.

6) Dealing with human limitations. Her own and others’, in this case. And no, not in the so-familiar holding pattern in which everyone else’s needs—children’s, male partner’s, siblings’, parents’, random passing men’s—come before the needs of the heroine, who is a selfless (and often spineless) martyr. A woman in this kind of plot would need to choose and act; the difference is that she’s not able to knock down every barrier in her way as if she were a queen or a conquering savior.

What’s her life like if she’s living in the middle of an occupation? A natural disaster? A magical disaster? The sudden appearance of an alien species? A difficult political situation, with necessary compromises and powerful opponents who must be appeased? A personal limitation, such as a disdain for violence in a society where violence is one of the prime ways to advance? A chosen limitation, such as a refusal to go on bailing a rebellious child out of trouble?

This is where I have a lot of frustration with some specific fantasy plot devices, which are designed to destroy all the barriers the protagonist faces. Loopholes are the ones I hate most, but also common are sudden unbeatable power, prophecies, coerced loyalty because of prophecy (“But we have to obey her! She’s the Chosen One!”), and a simple lack of ethics (such as the heroine who has no problem killing other people because they’re The Enemy).

Why waste a beautiful difficult situation by insisting that the difficulties are just an illusion?

7) Work. If the center of a female protagonist’s life is her work, that’s often a problem. If she has children, of course she’s too busy to be a proper mother to them. If she’s performing a job commonly done by men in her society, then she runs the risk of losing her femaleness (see point 3). If she’s an artist, she turns out not to be as good an artist as she thinks she is, and/or discovers that she wants a man/a family more than her art.

Why not have work be the center of your female protagonist’s story? She can still have a perfectly ordinary life outside work. Many male protagonists in fantasy are presented as having had friends, lovers, training, different jobs, and families in the past before they started saving the world or going on the quest or fighting in the war. A female protagonist can be a dedicated botanist, but that doesn’t mean that she’s automatically a bad mother or a dangerous workaholic.

Of course, fantasy also has an allergy to work as such. (Tasks are a different matter. For one thing, you can tell that it’s a task because the hero/ine is reluctant to undertake it and certain that s/he’ll be no good at it). There’s no reason that prejudice has to endure, especially because something that’s simple here may be difficult in another world—or another world may have work that doesn’t exist here. Try giving your female protagonist a job without implying that she’s a bad person for having one, and see what happens.

I has a feminist science fiction class!

2007-11-20T15:34:19Z

A while ago, I proposed a feminist science fiction class at the university where I'm studying next semester. I didn't know if they'd actually accept it, as most of the women's literature classes focus on historical periods instead, but I thought it couldn't hurt to try.

They accepted it!

Next semester I will be teaching:

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. LeGuin
Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy
The Two of Them, Joanna Russ
Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, James Tiptree, Jr.
Bloodchild and Other Stories, Octavia Butler
Daughters of Earth, ed. by Justine Larbaleister (this is a collection of both stories and critical essays about the stories).

I know some of the supplementary material I'll be adding to the class, like the two essays LeGuin wrote about gender in The Left Hand of Darkness and her short story "Winter's King," set in the same world. I'm looking forwards to finding more essays, well-written blog entries, and so on (though the class is mostly about older SF, I'd like to encourage my students to take a look at the online feminist SF community).

If anyone has any suggestions, I'd be more than happy to look at them.

Book reviews: Bear and Monette, Morgan

2007-11-16T01:40:58Z

Another attempt to clear some of the enormous backlog. Maybe shorter and more frequent posts will work for me, instead of trying to do them all at once.

Elizabeth Bear and Sarah Monette, A Companion to Wolves

Set in a world heavily based off Norse mythology, this follows a young jarl’s son named Njall (at first; he changes his name to Isolfr after his bonding), who bonds to a she-wolf and becomes part of a group of warriors who fight against trolls and wyverns to protect human settlements. The trellwolves share their minds, their lives, and their sexual drives with their human partners. Because the konigenwolves, who lead the packs, are she-wolves, and all the warriors bonded to wolves are male, that means that a konigenwolf’s partner ends up having sex with a lot of different partners when she’s in heat—consensual or not. This is Isolfr’s fate.

I’m glad to say that I liked this a lot better than Carnival, the last Bear novel I read. The politics are interesting without being so horrendously complex that the reader gets lost (the core of my problem with Carnival). The svartalfar whom Isolfr meets and the trolls are both more complex than they appear at first glance. Gender roles are questioned, sometimes directly, sometimes glancingly, especially when Isolfr becomes the father of a daughter and realizes exactly what being bonded to a konigenwolf means. And the lupine characters aren’t twee the way that Lackey’s Companions and so many bond animals end up being.

My problems are mostly restricted to a bit of confusion with characters. There are so many characters in the book that it’s easy to confuse them, and the changing names of all the wolfcarls don’t help. Also, some of the characters simply vanish from the plotline when they’ve made whatever impact they were supposed to make, which is odd considering how close-knit the wolfcarl society is. And finally, there’s really no reason given as to why women can’t bond with wolves; it simply never comes up. But I still enjoyed it as a diversion.

Richard K. Mogan, Black Man/Thirteen

(This book is titled Black Man in the UK, but Thirteen in the US. Gee, I wonder why?)

This is near-future SF, set in the early part of next century, after humanity has become proficient enough in genetic engineering to scare itself shitless. Several kinds of “variants” have been created by gene tinkering, but the story centers around the thirteens, men engineered to be sociopaths and utterly dominant alpha males, of a kind that mostly vanished with the hunter-gatherer societies. Since the passage of laws that sharply restricted, at least in the Western world, what could be done with genetic engineering, most thirteens have been banished to reservations or to Mars. Carl Marsalis, the Black British man who’s the major protagonist of the novel, was exiled to Mars, but came back, and he spends his time hunting down rogue thirteens.

This book has all sorts of little details that pushed my buttons. Intellectual conversations between characters, where many of the most important characterization moments are located! Gender roles played with, including masculinity and thoughtful use of the term “male-identified woman”! Racial and religious issues openly addressed for both major characters (Marsalis, who’s an atheist, and Sevgi Ertekin, a Turkish-American woman)! A future where Christian fundamentalism and not Islamic fundamentalism turned out to be the major political danger, causing the US to split apart politically! Technology with evocative names, so you could guess what it was, integrated as part of the characters’ lives and the plot! Complication of seemingly simple issues! Sarcasm! A deeply intelligent main character, even if he is also paranoid! Bad guys who make arguments that actually make sense and get you to nod along in agreement! (I really salute Morgan for that last one, which I’ve so rarely seen done right).

Not many minuses for me with this book. There are a few too many times when Marsalis’s paranoia/intuition saves everybody’s necks (he’s wrong about a few things, luckily, but probably not enough). There’s a bait-and-switch that very nearly came too late in the story to work for me. And this is not a book you should read if you think George R. R. Martin has too much violence and sex in his world. Morgan has never met a graphic description he didn’t like. They served the plot and the characterization, so I never felt them gratuitous, but my tolerance for both is much higher than some readers’ might be.

limyaael @ 2007-11-01T16:08:00

2007-11-01T20:10:10Z

Even though I'm not officially participating in NaNo (because I'm not sure I'd be able to keep up the pace), I am writing a novel during November. It will all be public, because I want it that way, and will have a Creative Commons License put on it. Here is the first chapter of Fortune Favors the Bold.

My thoughts on Acacia, let me show them to you.

2007-10-21T02:07:10Z

Beware, as this post has mild spoilers for Acacia by David Anthony Durham.

Alas, I think I am giving up on Acacia. It's not a bad book, and it has a multiracial world and at least one seriously cool religious concept that I'm impressed with. But I think I've just grown too disenchanted with epic fantasy to have the kind of patience a book like this demands- especially when I don't particularly like any of the characters, and not enough time is spent in their viewpoints to interest me in them. Also, Thirteen has caught my attention to the point where it's hard to want to read anything else right now.

1) I want the world to be lived and expressed through the characters. The characters should seem like natural products of the environment- or, if there are deviations, they're explained somehow- and the environment should show itself to be influenced by their actions, even if only in small ways. Infodumping? Not the way to accomplish this. Acacia sheds the infodumping after the first few chapters, but unfortunately it retains a viewpoint problem. This book is a great example of why the omniscient voice so rarely works for me. Without a personality to that voice, it cuts the world apart from the characters. I can be told anything about the world, and that anything is the truth. Great, but how does that world influence the characters, then? I usually don't know. Don't give me a lecture about the sociological levels of your created world. Instead, show me a character musing on that, through his or her own biased perspective, which expresses the character's personality, conceals surprises where you want them concealed, and shows how this character regards them.

2) I just can't take most of the central concepts seriously anymore. I have a hard time reading about royalty and investing it with as much dignity as the author wants me to put in. Likewise, I roll my eyes at absolutely evil enemies. (Acacia has these, to the detriment of the story). I think destiny is completely silly at best, sadistic at worst. Why should thousands of people have to suffer just so that something can happen at the "right" time? What makes the savior so much more special than other people? I'm interested in prophecies only if the author essentially turns them inside out. And don't get me started about teenagers who basically become rulers because they're too bullheaded to die and have magic that no one else wields. Not good traits for a politician, okay? And a lot of epic fantasies want to have it both ways: the monarch is a political ruler, and yet isn't a politician, never having to make those nasty compromises or deal head-on with the court machinations that tarnish the souls of other characters. Give me a series where the non-political monarchs mess up their countries, and we'll talk.

3) The worlds seem so potted. There's a certain sequence the gods follow in creating the world. (At least Acacia breaks the mold a bit here, with the gods being intimately related to the magic). There's one major event in the past that's the cause of just about all evil. (Acacia, unfortunately, did not escape this trap). There are a few heroic monarchs hanging about in the historical background, never enough to make that history feel populated. People's qualities and allegiances are largely determined by group affiliation, sometimes country and sometimes racial heritage and sometimes magical affiliation. (Acacia does that, too). There is a distinct lack of variation in culture, with the exception of clothing- no art, no literature, no complex patterns of civilization, none of the myriad ways that people come to inhabit their mental and physical worlds and conjoin them together. In the worst cases, everyone speaks the same language all across vast continents, denying even that marker of difference. There is not enough variation. Fantasy worlds need a lot more cultural diversity than they receive.

4) Too much not-happening. The things that do happen are almost always battles, daring escapes, and so on- high on the drama. Then the buildup for further dramatic events strands the authors in the middle of mired plots going nowhere fast. There is little genuine intelligent conversation, almost no domestic time, few relationships that aren't forged on the run or disrupted violently by betrayal or death. Once again, it feels like a setpiece for a certain story, not a genuinely inhabited world that is always existing on and around and with the characters.

5) The world is not adult enough. No, I don't mean the amount of gore or sex. I mean that a great many characters are emotionally immature (you can see this most often in the romances, but also in the melodramatic friendships and the way that characters will change at the drop of a hat). Relationships are not complicated enough; people can be ripped apart and decide to disregard years of affection based on a single revelation about destiny, prophecy, or royalty. And those dramatic events the author spends so much time building into the story? Often, they depend on ignoring certain practical realities. I think it's a lot more fun to show what you can do with small things and cleverness that figures out obstacles and overcomes them, instead of pretending that everyone will be stupid at just the right moment. And if you plunge the characters into a painful situation, show the nuances of that pain, instead of pretending that they can heal instantly or that everything will change because someone else conveniently dies or turns out to be evil.

It's odd, because I do still love secondary-world fantasy more than urban fantasy. But I think I've been lucky enough to find authors who are doing something a bit different with the concepts I like, and I've also changed my reading patterns to include a lot more science fiction lately, so I'm not noticing the real lack a dose of tolerable epic fantasy once would have left in my world.

Not a Good Idea #345

2007-10-16T19:50:59Z

Trying to read Richard K. Morgan's Thirteen, David Anthony Durham's Acacia*, Ian McDonald's Brasyl, and Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policeman's Union all at the same time. Genres are, in order: next-century dystopia (to give you an idea, Morgan's version of the US is called Jesusland); epic fantasy (complete with infodumping and repetition that makes me roll my eyes, though I like some of the characters and basic ideas); mixture of historical novel, contemporary novel, and near-future SF novel, all set in Brazil (these three strands intertwine with one another, and not all the important words are in the glossary, even though the glossary claims they are there); and alternate history (the biggest Jewish community formed in the Alaskan Panhandle, not in Israel, which collapsed).

Unfortunately, they all came into the library for me at the same time, and I only have two weeks to read them. As well as grade and write and do all the other stuff that comprises my life.

Yay!

*How lazy am I? This lazy: I couldn't remember Durham's middle name, so I typed it into Google as I was writing this post instead of walking to the book which is less than ten feet away.

Quick book review

2007-10-03T21:34:49Z

Just a quick book review; there are many, many more coming if I ever get back up to speed. *looks in despair at enormous piles of books, both read and unread*

Red Seas Under Red Skies, Scott Lynch

This is the direct sequel to The Lies of Locke Lamora, and one of those you really can’t summarize because doing so would give away too much about the first book. Suffice it to say that it does continue the adventures of Locke Lamora, master thief, in a far different setting than the previous book—in fact, settings, since he also becomes a pirate. If you read the first book for the thrilling detail behind the larceny plots, there is no drop in quality at all; in fact, I think this one is slightly better as far as that goes.

Alas, for me it was a disappointment. I think Locke is on the verge of becoming the lovable rogue archetype. He smashes threats too easily. At one point in the book, there is what looks like it will be a complicated problem for Locke, because for the first time he’s really thinking about the morality he’s ignored. And then the complicated problem turns out to have a simple solution. Um, no. It’s akin to having the hero “solve poverty” by taking the throne.

Also, I just can’t buy the idea of Locke as a Robin Hood, which is supposedly part of the appeal of the books. First of all, he doesn’t steal money from the rich and give it to the poor; he steals money from the rich and keeps it for himself. That’s a rather important distinction. Second, I don’t care if he was born in one of the poorest parts of his own city; he’s been raised and trained to be essentially a nobleman. So he has all kinds of advantages that other people around him don’t have. At several points in the story, despite the danger threatening Locke, I was rolling my eyes because so much of the danger was a result of his own actions that I couldn't truly pity him. Locke wasn’t someone forced into defending himself from an enemy who attacked out of the blue, the way he was in the first book. He made enemies. On purpose. Excuse me if I don’t think that their striking back is really unjustified, and if the “straight white privileged male angst about reasonable consequences” is getting a bit boring.

The legal system, punishments, judgment, and "justice"

2007-09-30T14:11:50Z

This is a questionnaire format more than anything else. I seem to be blocked on writing regular rants, so we’ll see how this works.

1) What are your laws like? Too often, laws just show up in fantasy to add a little convenience or inconvenience to a story. Thanks to a little-known law, for example, the protagonist can compete with her accuser in the kind of single magical combat she’s good at instead of having to argue with him. Or the protagonist is arrested because of a plainly ridiculous, vague, and obtuse law that doesn’t apply to what she actually did.

This is another case where it’s good to remember that other people beyond your protagonist exist, that her society was there before she was and will be there after she’s gone (unless she’s a goddess, I suppose, but I am exiling all the godly characters to the corner today). Those people need laws for their own benefit, whether the protagonist is present or not. They may, of course—probably will—have to live with unclear or vague ones, and will try to change whatever kind of legal system is present to their own advantage. But it should be as coherent a part of the background as the system of inheritance in the monarchy or the reasons that people own land.

So. What are the laws like? Who makes them? What assumptions of power do they make? (For example, the automatic idea is that the laws must favor the wealthy, but if a different class, such as mages, is privileged in your society, they probably have their own legal safeguards). How are they passed? How is that process vulnerable to corruption? What safeguards against corruption are set in place? Yes, of course they can probably be broken, but, once more, your legal system shouldn’t be a chaos where coherent sentences flourish only by accident. If it can’t present the appearance of authority—notice I did not say “justice”—no one else has a reason to listen to it.

2) Who deals with the law? Lawyers are not inevitable.

No, really.

It depends on the assumptions guiding your legal system. One of the American legal system’s is that law should be majestic and obscure and hard to understand, or it’s not law. To grasp the law, you need special training, in the language and in the consequences and in the cases that set a precedent. And just because you’re qualified to deal with one branch of law doesn’t mean you can deal with others. If you don’t believe me, ask a civil defense attorney about copyright law.

Now, an invented culture can have completely different assumptions about this, especially if it’s a smaller society than modern America’s (which most of them are) and money/profit is not at the core of the way it lives (totally possible). It could be religious law, with law shaped so as to please the deity and not offend. This may sound funny, but you are not the one about to be cooked by a lightning bolt. And if you think the Ten Commandments are an exception because they’re a universally applicable set of general human principles, look at the first four of them again.

Perhaps the invented culture puts peaceful emotional relationships among others at the core of its existence. That would make them extremely unlikely to have laws which would encourage discord instead of reconciliation. They might have professional negotiators instead of professional lawyers. They might pay a great deal of attention to how people behaved towards each other and what they thought. A dispute might be mostly talked about until it solved itself. Persuasive argument could still be a powerful tool of the legal system, but its audience would not be judge and jury.

(Actually, I’d like to see that, because many of the fantasy societies with a different legal system seem to prioritize discord and offense instead—i.e., blood feuds).

Consider how magic gets involved, as well. It never made sense to me that a society with a high number of telepaths and empaths wouldn’t utilize them in its legal system. Perhaps there are moral sanctions against doing so, but then why are there no moral sanctions against having telepaths read the thoughts of friends? And if an empath can read the irritation of her next-door neighbor when his day didn’t go well, wouldn’t she also be able to feel his pain and fear as he was murdered? That doesn’t mean she’d know who did it, but I find it strange that she wouldn’t be involved at all in the resulting investigation, if only to confirm that it was murder.

The single most difficult thing about integrating magic with the functioning of your legal system is to set limits that make sense. Think about it carefully, especially with mental magic.

3) How is magic used? This is yet another place where knowing the logic and principles behind your legal system will come in handy. Your readers might think a particular use of magic is immoral, but the society involved should not (or the discrepancies in its use should at least be justified. I think far too many fantasies rely on their own fantasy, that everyone in the world except the protagonists would be too crushed to do something about the most blatant corruption and lack of logic).

For example: Forensic murder magic is distrusted because it involves cutting off a piece of the corpse, and the dead person’s relatives are a bit skeevy about what exactly this mage is going to do with Our Bertie’s finger. Fair enough. But then why, later in the story, does the forensic mage show up with the valuable information in the nick of time? Did he find a corpse without relatives to object? Did he somehow hurry what we’ve been told is usually a long, delicate negotiation process? Sometimes it’s that, and sometimes there turns out to be a loophole so that something not thought to be possible with forensic magic is possible after all!

Yeah. And pepper your project with loopholes like that, and all that carefully crafted tension and worldbuilding you’ve done has gone to waste.

I’m all in favor of integrating magic into a fantasy world’s legal system; I think that if it was readily available, or even available but chancy, people would use it, and find ways to make it safer and more accurate. But using magic as a sword to cut the Gordian knot of legal complications is no more advisable than to suddenly declare that your heroine has accessed her inaccessible power to defeat the dark lord.

4) How just is the treatment given criminals? Perhaps not at all. But again, there will have to be some rhetoric to justify that, if only along the lines of, “People like this are too dumb to understand the legal system anyway,” or, “Since she’s a member of [insert X despised group of people here], she doesn’t deserve the treatment that we’d give one of our own citizens.”

Think about basing the rules on something that is not English common law or the Miranda rights. Again, it should make sense for the society. Perhaps the right to silence is irrelevant, because they have telepaths who can pull the truth out of your head anyway. Perhaps the wronged person or the wronged person’s friends and relatives have the right to beat up the accused, but only for a limited period of time. Perhaps the accused has the right to make a speech, granted because many of them are hysterical anyway and won’t be good speakers. Perhaps theological law has transformed into political and social law, so there are still odd exceptions built into normal legal conduct for the sake of gratifying the gods.

Consider changing the treatment depending on the crime and the amount of evidence, too. Murder can earn a harsher handling than stealing a loaf of bread, and murder where the suspect was caught in the act doubly so. And connect the treatment of individuals to larger patterns in the society. What kinds of people are victim and criminal, and what is the normal attitude towards them? If women have a low status in the fantasy society, rape may not be considered a crime against the woman at all, but only a crime against another man’s property. Or a noble’s son may find himself in a sticky position because he stabbed a young woman he assumed was a lower-class prostitute, despised by most of the people he knows, but it turns out that she’s the emperor’s cousin. Or a city of pale-skinned people might be negotiating a delicate truce with a darker nomadic tribe for their goods, and so a boy’s throwing stones at a nomad child and breaking his skull happened at just the wrong time, while if it took place a month previous no one in the city would have cared.

5) Who has the right to inflict punishment? If your legal system is set up very differently from the US/Western European one, judges are not inevitable either. Or juries. There may be a magistrate who decides on the punishment in reference to laws already on the books, without bothering to call for a jury. Judgment may be left up to the gods, to the victim or her relatives, to someone entirely outside the conflict who is deemed more impartial, or to a mage who is considered the servant of justice. (Something like the last happens in Diane Duane’s Stealing the Elf-King’s Roses, though it’s not done particularly well). The amount of interference that outside parties who are not said judge have in the process may be great—the ability to give bribes to ensure a certain outcome, for example—or severely limited.

As with the other adjustments you’ll make to your created legal system, this depends a great deal on what your society values. Impartiality is at the core of what supposedly makes a good judge for us, but within another culture’s rules, it might be the favor of the gods, or sympathy for the victim, or being the daughter of a long and distinguished lineage of women who have always made favorable judgments in the past. Decide, or look at, what you’ve established as having value in other aspects of your society and why, and enact it here.

6) What are the punishments like? Execution, or the threat of execution, is fairly common in most fantasies that involve the legal system, but there are plenty of reasons to avoid it (strong murder taboos, a concern for what will happen to those who see it, concern for pain, the religious consequences of killing another person, lack of anyone who can perform the necessary kind of death, and so on), so here are some others:

Exile
Shunning/ostracism
Maiming, such as removal of a finger or a hand or an eye
Indentured servitude or slavery (which can be along a continuum with indentured servitude or entirely different from it)
Payment of a fine (possible in animals or land as well as money)
Imprisonment
Removal of what made the crime possible in the first place (if a theft happened because a woman needed money to fix the leaking roof of her house, the people she stole it from might think that pulling down the house would solve the problem)
Loss of privileges (such as the freedom to move wherever one likes; a criminal might have to stay inside or just outside the boundaries of the town)
Parole, or forms of it (such as being required to report to a magistrate or religious leader every few days on one’s movements)
Restriction of interactions with other people (maybe a condemned criminal can still speak to adults but not children, lest he corrupt them)
The wearing of an identifying marker (The Scarlet Letter)
Death at a distance (exposure, or casting someone out into a desert with little water and no clothing)
A risky task (“Hunt down this other escaped criminal who’s much more violent than you are and bring her back, and we may forgive you”)
Humiliation (such as public abasement to the victim)

Why use these? To vary the legal system, and also to posit a society in which execution is not the punishment for everything. (If it were, then once again you run the risk of creating a legal system that no one but the very protected can justify and which should have been attacked and/or toppled long before now).

Eventual novel

2007-09-04T02:03:47Z

I've started a novel journal (my first one unique to InsaneJournal) that will begin posting in November. (I'm going to use NaNoWriMo as a lift-off, though I doubt the novel will be completed in a month, and I probably won't keep to that exact posting pace of 1667 words a day). It'll also be public, and available under a Creative Commons License, as soon as I can figure out which one best allows for any use except a) someone else claiming they wrote it and b) someone else selling it for profit. I'm doing that because I want to.

If you want to take a look at it, a post summarizing the bare bones/beginning of the plot is here: Fortune Favors the Bold Its profile may also prove informative.

Rant on winged humanoids

2007-08-26T01:14:13Z

Long time, no see.

And because trying to work on the “good points about urban fantasy” rant was blocking me like hell.

1) Remember that the wings will be part of your character’s body. This is patently obvious, unless your character is someone who just recently acquired wings, say as part of a genetic experiment or a magical transformation, or can take them on and off at will. But it does get forgotten. People in fantasy stories who have had wings since babyhood will act as if they don’t know how to handle them.

Why? It’s the same anthropocentrism that I’ve talked about in other rants on nonhumans. The author sometimes can’t comprehend that just because wings are unusual for her and everyone else she knows, that doesn’t mean they’re also unusual for her characters. So she writes them as if they were humans+wings, instead of winged humanoids.

Once again, body-centered writing is useful here. Think about the weight of wings, the difference they’d make in balance and locomotion, the accommodations that one would need to make in walking, leaning, sitting, lying down (see also point 2). If a movement or gesture would be too awkward for someone to make with wings, such as lying down perfectly flat, then don’t have them do it. They’ll have their own substitutes, particularly if they’re adults.

Think, also, of what wings can add. What do they contribute to gestures, especially in the way of emphasis and communication? How do they make their owners’ lives easier and more convenient? Someone who’s lived for thirty years, winged, in a society where it’s the norm might not be as afraid of falling, might be used to plenty of room, might value the warmth that comes when she stands embracing someone not only with her arms but with her wings.

Now, though, we’re straying into territory that properly belongs to point 2.

2) Consider how wings fit into your characters’ culture. Think they won’t alter it much? Think again. Human cultures are shaped silently but massively around the facts that we walk upright, that we have hands, and that we have little hair and no tails. Wings might not play as heavy a part in the creation of culture as hands, but I bet they’re no less important than an upright posture.

Among the things that, will at a minimum, need to be considered:

-Furniture.
-Clothing.
-Doorways/entrances/windows.
-Casual communicative gestures (wings, especially if they’re colorful, would attract attention at a far greater distance than the wave of a hand).
-Conceptions of space (birds and pilots, like fish, live in a three-dimensional world).
-Metaphors, insults, and names.
-Architecture in general.
-Games and play (something that, in many fantasy novels, no one seems to do).
-Stories, especially those that explain the creation of the world and the sentient kinship to animals; winged humanoids might feel especially close to birds, bats, dragons, or insects.
-Protections from weather.
-Medicine.
-Expectations of average physical endurance and prowess.
-Transportation.
-Arrangement of cities and towns.
-Territory, borders, and nationalism.
-Education.
-Weapons and armor.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that everything needs to be created completely differently from most common human objects. Perches would be of little use to someone who could fly to them but did not have the kind of bird-foot necessary to grip them. Clothing would have to fit around the wings, but couldn’t be too loose and flowing or it would get in the way of flight (and it might need to fit differently around the torso in any case, if your invented species has large flight muscles there). Decide what needs to be adapted, but decide also on the depth of acknowledgment that you want to give any one particular thing in your story.

3) How fragile are the wings? This will determine a lot about how your invented species participates in war and conducts medicine, if nothing else. If your characters’ bones are hollow and fragile, they might be skilled in setting and healing them, and a broken bone is nothing to worry about. On the other hand, if a wing, once broken, can never be truly mended, or if a hole torn in the leather of a bat-pinion is always open, they would probably have evolved sophisticated protection. (Skilled smiths at an appropriate technological level might be able to make lightweight metal sheaths for wings that could be worn into battle).

The society can, of course, make accommodations for those who tear wings, have to have them amputated, or are born wingless, the same way that human societies have always made accommodations for those with chronic diseases or who are disabled. But to have no protection at all is nonsensical.

4) Decide on the feelings towards air/the skies/the wind. Here, after all, is a new natural realm not traditionally open to most human societies. In the technologically-oriented, capitalist societies where it is, airplanes fail to give many people that feeling of soaring freedom that wings would. How do your characters treat the chance to hunt in open air? To soar, to circle, to share the dreams of birds? How do they use and exploit the winds? How do they react when bad weather confines them to the ground? How and when can they fly after dark?

Depending on technology level and local conditions, the winged humanoids might or might not have a lot of time to sit around contemplating the sheer aesthetics of the air, but humanity has always reacted to its natural environment. The idea that you don’t need to is a distinctly modern one, only a few generations old; weighing against that is about two million years of evolution that attunes us to the conditions of other life. So how is that environment braided into their lives? Do they give equal time to air and ground? Do they go back and forth between them depending on the season? Do some skilled hunters and gatherers make their living exclusively on the wing, while others stay lower? What external threats or cultural holds might prevent them from doing everything they can to exploit it?

How does the sky get into the art? What about rain, snow, clouds, the sun, the moon(s), the stars? They might well have a better understanding of weather than many human societies on the ground do, since they might be able to get above the clouds and see the sun shining on while a storm pummels the ground below. Do they follow migrating birds and butterflies? How far do they travel? How much do they try to model their lives after other species, and what do they learn from them?

Once again, don’t overdo this. Not every piece of art and activity in a farming society will concern farming, so there’s no need for everything in a flying society to concern flying, either. But it should be omnipresent, rather like the wings themselves.

5) What other adaptations do they have that make flight easier? It’s much more than just wings that drive a bird’s flight, after all. There are also air sacs, hollow bones, flight muscles, streamlining of the body, tails to steer, various kinds of feathers, and a general shedding of weight; get too heavy and you can’t get off the ground. Which, if any of those, do your characters have? Or do they look like normal humans except for the wings and rely on magic to give them lift?

Perhaps they’re not modeled after birds, but after bats. Bats, however, are still fairly light and small, and their flight pattern is far different from that of a bird. How does having leathery wings instead of feathered ones affect your humanoid species? Do they also need echolocation and a nocturnal existence?

Or perhaps they have wings that resemble a dragonfly’s or a butterfly’s, as the majority of fairies in fantasy artwork do. How do they keep the dust on their wings from rubbing off, as happens to butterflies and moths, and becoming less flight-worthy? How do they keep them from crumpling? These wings are generally so light that, if your humanoid species is not small, then they are almost certainly going to need magic to fly. However, I’d be interested in seeing other adaptations made, such as short, spiraling flights that conserve energy and don’t risk the wings. Not every winged species needs to be capable of lengthy migration the way monarch butterflies and Canadian geese are. They might keep close to the ground and use their wings mostly for leaps and gliding.

Or perhaps the wings are of a different sort altogether—like a flying squirrel’s flaps of skin, say. I don’t think I’ve ever read a fantasy story like that, which increases my desire to see one. That would require further adaptations to the body, and the people might wind up looking rather less humanoid.

I can’t say what or when the next rant will be yet.

Another new InsaneJournal community

2007-08-19T17:20:42Z

originalslash

This is for writers of original fiction about homosexual/bisexual/transgendered/queer characters who want to discuss, bitch, moan, and ask questions about such fiction. It specifically excludes fanfic and NaNoWriMo/NaNoWriYe updates.

(And yes, slash may be a problematic term to apply to original fiction, but it's one that many writers of this kind of fiction are used to using, and it will make it easier to find the comm).

Idea for the community and the user info are credited to the_willow, who first came up with the idea.

limyaael @ 2007-08-16T22:25:00

2007-08-17T02:29:57Z

First round of poll answers:

tasllyn: The first fantasy book I remember reading is The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, because I'd seen the animated movie and wanted the book. Before that, I'd had a book called Catwitch read to me.

kellicat: I do, though it's more on Bradley than just Darkover. Here it is.

darkredd: Well, that would depend entirely if the pirate or the ninja were fighting on water or on land, wouldn't it?

barhah: I think there are some really interesting and funny ideas on the Evil Overlord List, but I get uneasy whenever I hear people referring to it as a "Bible." After all, there are some fatigued scenarios it has to have left out, and ideas on there that might still be good if written properly.

jetamors: My strongest point as a writer is characterization; I feel as though I can get inside people's heads and do a good enough job to make odd mindsets and motivations comprehensible. My weakest point is figuring out how to improve. For example, I think I should work more on physical description, but then I wonder whether that's really a problem and if I shouldn't work on something else.

suzene: It would be much easier to answer this question if I had seen more animal sidekicks done well. As it is, I'd have to say they're something I love, but more as a guilty pleasure than because I think they're a good addition to a fantasy story.

acaciaonnastik: Collapse, usually. I get wound up to a fever pitch either with anger or excitement, and then I'm an utter emotional basket case and have to go to bed.

kuchehexe: I have a few other icons, but mainly I don't use them because I just forget. If you have time/willingness/patience, I'd love an icon with the phrase, "No matter how subtle the wizard, a knife between the shoulder blades will seriously cramp his style," if that's not too long- maybe it could be animated? or a custom IJ layout in forest green.

cat_i_th_adage: Obviously, parsley is scarier. Nutmeg does not have that smell. (Seriously, parsley and green beans make my stomach queasy with their odors).

Ask me more questions!

I did this once, a long time ago, and it was fun.

2007-08-17T00:04:51Z

And going back and editing old entries in this journal made me want to do it again, partially to commemorate the move to IJ. So:

View Poll: I has a poll

I'll put the answers up in another post when I have enough of them. Any question's fair game, though I might not answer if it gets too personal.