Haruspicium

A Short Reading List On "True Narratives"

Tue, 21 Apr 2009 04:44:21 GMT

About my statement here that Quite a few literary traditions admit only true narratives (what is meant by true is a more complex matter than it would be for us, but that's another topic), comrade_cat asks, any recommended reading?

The other Toelken, folklorist Barre, repeatedly emphasizes that rather than asking what the myth says about what people believed to be true, ask what values the story is dramatizing. There are some great anecdotes on this subject scattered through his writings on Native American myth, which are among the best. For example, he asked one Navajo singer about a particular healing chantway, "Do you really believe the person is ill because they have red ants in their bloodstream?" The singer reflected and answered, "Not ants, but Ants"(Toelken's typographic rendering), and then, "We have to have a way of thinking strongly about disease." These attitudes aren't necessarily universal; there are literalists and fundamentalists in Native communities too.

Toelken, Barre (1976), "Seeing with a native eye: How many sheep will it hold?" in Capps, Walter Holden ed., (1976) Seeing With a Native Eye: Essays on Native American Religion.
---- (1976). "The 'pretty languages' of Yellowman: Genre, mode and texture in Navaho Coyote narratives," in Dan Ben-Amos, ed., Folklore Genres.
Wasson, George B. and Barre Toelken (2001), "Coyote and the Strawberries: cultural drama and intercultural collaboration," in Larry Evers and Barre Toelken, eds., Native American Oral Traditions.

and on dramatization of myth and healing, see also:
Levi-Strauss, Claude (1963) "The effectiveness of symbols," in Structural Anthropology.

Longer works but totally recommended for anyone seriously pursuing the topic:
Basso, Keith (1996), Wisdom Sits in Places.
Cruikshank, Julie (1998). The Social Life of Stories.
Cruikshank, Julie, Angela Sidney, Kitty Smith and Annie Ned (1990), Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders.
Toelken, Barre (2003), The Anguish of Snails (more general, written as an intro textbook).

And lastly on the subject of what people really do believe to be true in myth:

Toelken, Barre (1987), "Life and death in the Navajo Coyote tales," in Brian Swann and Arnold Krupat, eds., Recovering the Word.
Allen, Paula Gunn (2002), "Special problems in teaching Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony," in Allan Chavkin, ed., Silko's Ceremony: A Casebook.

Disparate Thoughts on Ballard, the Nature of Memory, a Fisher-Queen, and Fantasy Generally

Mon, 20 Apr 2009 09:02:18 GMT

Have missed several Black Gate blog posts. Here's today's:

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RIP, J.G. Ballard.

His was among the strange New Worlds fiction that I encountered as an unsuspecting kid in my brother's sf collection, higgledy-piggledy among the Clarke, Asimov, and Simak. I didn't know what to make of it then, but it's been sitting in my backbrain all these years, still messing with the contents.

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Strangely, one of my grad school professors was, like Ballard, born and raised in Shanghai, and like him was also interned as a boy by the Japanese during World War II. He said, of both the book and movie versions of Empire of the Sun, "It was nothing like that." I wish now I had taken notes; he gave a number of specific examples. But it shows that memoir (and memory), like fiction, are the product of an intensely personal process. This is the construction of meaning through narrative.

In searching academic literature on memory recently, I came across a review article on "Trauma and Memory" (Van der Kolk, Bessel A. (1998), Psychiatry and Clinical Neurosciences 52:S97-S109). The author compares the recollection of traumatic events with ordinary memories from both a clinical and a neuroscience perspective. Combat veterans and other sufferers of PTSD do not experience recollection of the most traumatic events as memory, but as fragments of direct, unprocessed sensory input. During traumatic experiences, the sense-impressions received by the brain bypass the parts, like the hippocampus, that would organize them into a coherent form of consciousness, and so memories do not form as in ordinary experience. This "organizing" is the creation of a narrative out of the fragments and at the same time, creation of meaning which the fragments lacked. At the clinical level, processing traumatic memory was the stitching together of a story of the experience..... a process which most of us, most of the time, do so effortlessly we hardly notice.

No wonder being told stories, in fiction, in movies, in art, has such a huge effect on how we think and feel. Narrative is how we think and feel. But there are, I think, further depths here. Years ago, I read a dissertation on the structural analysis of psychotherapeutic narratives. What struck me then was how filled these personal narratives were with what I can only think of as mythic symbolism. In one, a woman suffered constant menstrual bleeding and infertility. She perceived it as, in a way, the consequence of a psychological wound, and there was a blond doctor, described in terms having to do with light and brightness, who helped stop the bleeding. I believe there was also a straight-up Grail object (the medicine) in the story as well, and to complete the mythic pattern she ought to have gotten pregnant, but I don't now remember.

One aspect of myth, fairytale, and fantasy as well is the way that such primary symbols as blood, light, wounding, healing, are present at the surface of the narrative. It's one of the characteristics that leads some to class them as more primitive forms, while literary realism and narrative based on personal real-life experience are supposed to be more psychologically sophisticated. What those psychotherapeutic narratives showed me was that even in our supposedly de-mythified postmodern society, the narratives (the meaning) we create out of our real-life experiences are shaped profoundly by both mythic structures and mythic symbols. Or perhaps what I mean is that myth is created out of direct personal experience. At any rate there's a big part of fantasy sitting square in this field, displaced enough from real life so as not to cause too much anxiety, but effective because it is, actually, about real life at this quite fundamental level.

On Writing Different Genres

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 05:53:41 GMT

Last week's Black Gate post. Behind, as always these days.

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Last week I had no figures at hand regarding children and teen reading rates. A 2007 National Endowment of the Humanities report on the topic is available here in pdf format (number 47). The short version is that the reading rate is not declining for children, but that as teenagers increasing numbers of kids stop reading. The 20-page executive summary does not define what they mean by "literary reading," but in the summary for report 46, it's given as "The reading of novels, short stories, poetry, or drama in any print format, including the Internet. Any type was admitted, from romance novels to classical poetry."

Also, I inadvertently posted an outdated bestseller list. Here is the most recent PW children's fiction list online; the ABA's indie children's bestseller lists overlap but are not identical. Both are heavily weighted toward fantasy, and this is even more true of the series lists.

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Yesterday (my yesterday; I'm 8 hours ahead of EST) Theo asked about subgenre preferences. I write in several different subgenres ranging from mythological fantasy to hard sf, and all writing is difficult, as far as I'm concerned. I do think there are differences, but first, a quibble, terminological or semantic as you prefer: all fiction is fantasy. Those of us of Indoeuropean linguistic and cultural affiliation participate in a set of related literary traditions who knows how many millennia deep, in which there are major narrative genres consisting of stories not considered true. This isn't so in all other parts of the world. Academic folklore (a Western, mostly Indoeuropean invention) has even hung itself up on the analytic criteria of "belief" and whether believing or not believing in a story's contents is a universal definitional criterion. It isn't. Quite a few literary traditions admit only true narratives (what is meant by true is a more complex matter than it would be for us, but that's another topic).

I bring this up partly because it seems that the sf/f genre subdivisions, and some of the arguments about the same, and some of the relative difficulties writing the same, are rooted in this deep IE literary division between true and untrue stories. Fantasy is stories about things that could never happen, while sf is about things that, based on what we can extrapolate from what we know now, might conceivably happen. I've heard many a sniff from hard-core sf readers that fantasy is a degraded genre because "anything can happen," and "you can make it all up." Excuse me, but I'm a fiction writer, and I can make it all up. By definition even the most rigorously extrapolated (read: imagined) future is never going to happen; at the level of content it's all "what if?"

At the level of execution, however, subgenres do use different sets of literary conventions. Sf has an extra set of formal rules that have to do with narrative treatment of the physical world: its workings have to seem as if they could be true. That statement has all kinds of qualifications which I won't get into right now; the relevant point here is that those can make the writing of it harder, but don't necessarily do so.

The difficulties, for me (getting around at last to that), arise less from the rules per se and more from their interaction with other aspects of story setting. In most fantasy, the setting is not that different from present-day mainstream US consensus reality, in which I include our common cultural heritage. The story is full of recognizable objects: house, rock, water, tree, cloth. The writer may tinker with the boundaries of certain qualities, for example that between animacy and inanimacy, but both are completely familiar concepts. Animate houses or swords may not belong to the reality that most of us inhabit, but the reader still pretty much knows how to imagine them, because all the elements are familiar.

My mythological fantasy Bear Daughter was in many ways easier to write than much else I've done, because I knew most of the pieces of it in advance. It was based largely on a non-consensus mythic tradition, but one very familiar to me. I would have said the story and its setting were fairly transparent. Some readers did not think so, and one reviewer said it was more alien and difficult to comprehend than far-future sf. It contained too many unfamiliar concepts for her; the magic and the magical beings didn't behave like mainstream-consensus elves and talking animals.

I've written earth-based near-future sf in which most of the setting is the familiar here-and-now, just add aliens. The way sf conventions required me to extrapolate about those aliens and the consequences of their actions was an extra set of rules I had to follow, but not a particularly problematic one.

The setting of my recent space opera novella "Pelago," in contrast, had to be completely re-imagined. It was set inside an AI-slash-space artifact, and information, its movement, and impediments to same were crucial to the progression of the story. I couldn't get my characters through a doorway without knowing how much the doorway knew, and how it felt, about their genetic makeup. Since I had set myself to follow hard-sf rules, I couldn't just wave my hands and say, "The space artifact is animate, and knows all!"; I needed a believable. it-could-be-true technology through which the artifact could know these things. That technology (which counts as part of the story setting) had all kinds of other ramifications for setting and characters and story progression. Making that as consistent as possible was a constant battle. Plus, once you change your setting that radically, you have to devote much more of the story to making the setting comprehensible to the reader. Yes, writing that kind of sf is much harder than writing any story, fantasy or sf, in which a door is just a door.

While writing "Pelago," another challenge for me that, say, a physicist wouldn't have faced, was making sure my space artifact (and the people on it) behaved according to conventional physics when that was appropriate. But that, I think, is in principle not that much different than knowing when the full moon rises, which in turn harks back to the issue of appropriate verisimilitude that has been discussed here before.

I think the issue Theo mentions, of the present changing too fast for sf to keep up, is a valid one, but probably applies more to near-future sf than other kinds, because that sub-subgenre directly invokes the present. Far-future sf has a much stronger admixture of "what if?", making it in that respect more like fantasy.

Lady Photographers

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 05:24:31 GMT

From a street in Al Satwa:

Family Medicine and Dismemberment

Thu, 09 Apr 2009 15:47:06 GMT

Children Are Reading Fantasy

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 07:09:55 GMT

The cross-posting of this week's Black Gate screed.

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There's recently been a bit of discussion here about kids reading sf/f. I spent some time this morning looking up sales figures for children's and YA speculative fiction, to discover that the most detailed information is in market reports that you have to pay for. Still, a few points.

First, no argument that gaming is a huge and growing market. I recall hearing recently that it has now surpassed movies in the entertainment hierarchy, but whether this was in terms of total dollars or percentage of people who consume, I can't now remember.

The percentage of kids who read is still in decline, though I haven't seen recent figures. As population grows, the total number of kids who read seems to be going up, however, or the kids who do read are reading more, as book sales are rising.

"In recent years, children's books have emerged as a welcome bright spot in the world of general bookselling"; children's books are helping to keep indy bookstores afloat.

And here is relatively recent publishing market data: "Total unit sales fell 6.7% in the week ended Dec. 7, 2008, compared to the week ended Dece. 9, 2007, according to BookScan. The adult segment had the worst week; adult nonfiction units were off 20.9% at the outlets that report data to BookScan. Juvenile fiction continued to be the strongest segment, with units up 24.1%."

The most recent overview I could find was a couple of years old; the gist is that kids are not getting tired of fantasy and in fact are demanding more. "HarperCollins children's publisher Susan Katz points out what she sees as a key difference. 'It's not our experience that the kids are saturated [with fantasy],' she says. 'It's more that book buyers are.'"

The most recent children's bestseller lists show a bunch of fantasy titles in every number category. Of the top 16 hardcover bestsellers, I count half as fantasy or sf, the Patterson and Colfer books falling in the latter category. The Maximum Ride books are about winged kids whose genes were admixed with bird DNA; Daniel X features aliens; and the Colfer title is self-explanatory.

300,000+
1. Breaking Dawn. Stephenie Meyer. Little, Brown/Tingley (6,051,981)
2. The Tales of Beedle the Bard. J.K. Rowling, illus. by Mary GrandPré. Scholastic/Levine (3,577,183)
3. Brisingr (The Inheritance Cycle). Christopher Paolini. Knopf (2,604,642)
6. Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Book Four: The Battle of the Labyrinth. Rick Riordan. Disney-Hyperion (1,000,000)
11. The Final Warning (Maximum Ride). James Patterson. Little, Brown (519,444)
12. The Dangerous Days of Daniel X. James Patterson. Little, Brown (517,918)
14. Artemis Fowl: The Time Paradox. Eoin Colfer. Disney-Hyperion (406,687)
15. Eclipse (Special Edition). Stephenie Meyer. Little, Brown/Tingley (345,669)

A question I'm currently facing with my own kid is what happens when avid young readers start to hit the adult shelves in bookstores and libraries. Looking at even mega-hits with an eye to what a kid will like reveals gobs of tedium.

Throe-wn off the horse

Tue, 31 Mar 2009 08:10:40 GMT

I have totally fallen off the lj horse. Partly it's that I've been in the throes (though I do like the increasingly common use of "throws" in this figure of speech) of completing a long-overdue academic article that proved (don't they always) harder than I expected. Article is on its way to editor! May it help me land a decent job back in the ol' USA.

Fiction? Ha! Thrown off that horse, too. I have been fiddling with a couple of hopefully commercial if very small-scale non-fiction projects.

We have had rain here off and on for the last few days and more forecast later in the week. It's a bit comical, sort of like Philadelphians and snow, police issuing public safety warnings and so on. Since most roads and parking lots are built without storm drains, it's also a problem.

Randomly, a Friday night at the old souq:

Alternate History I Will Probably Never Write

Sun, 15 Mar 2009 05:44:34 GMT

From the Wikipedia article on Jean-François de Galaup, comte de La Pérouse, commander of a French voyage of exploration in the 1780s that visited southeast Alaska along the way:

One of the men who applied for the voyage was a 16-year-old Corsican named Napoléon Bonaparte. Bonaparte, a second lieutenant from Paris's military academy at the time, made the preliminary list but he was ultimately not chosen for the voyage list and remained behind in France. At the time Bonaparte was interested in serving in the navy rather than army because of his proficiency in mathematics and artillery, both valued skills on warships. (One can only speculate on the course history might have taken had La Pérouse selected young Napoleon for the trip.)

Joseph Campbell, part 2: The Pity of the Wolves

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:41:53 GMT

This week's Black Gate post:

A few years ago, for one of Brian Swann's anthologies of traditional Native American literature, I translated a quasi-historical story from Kwakwaka'wakw oral tradition that contained in it an episode in which a dead man is brought back to life by wolves. One of the English word choices I struggled with was the term the revivified character later used to describe why the wolves had done it.

Stories about wolves resurrecting the dead permeate older bodies of Kwakwaka'wakw story, and range from ancestor myths to first-person accounts of shamanic initiation. The myths have a subgenre featuring adolescent heroes who go out into the wild, enter the spirit realm, encounter dangerous and beneficient beings--not infrequently dying and resurrecting in the process--and return home with spiritual treasures. Does that not sound just a little bit Campbellian?

One problem with seeing this subgenre as more evidence of the universality of Campbell's monomyth is that the genre as a whole also has stories featuring magical children and stories featuring mature heroes, each of which has a characteristic structure that is distinct from the adventures of the adolescent hero. All of these functioned the same way in society. In the study of communicative systems, of which languages are one kind of example and narrative genres are another, covariation of form and meaning is required before you can say something is structurally significant. And you can't construct a legitimate argument about universal grammar by taking the English present progressive and the Russian past imperfective and the Kwak'wala form for repeated action as your evidence and ignoring all other tenses and aspects. Each of those is part of a particular system (English, Russian, Kwak'wala) and has a function and meaning within the system.

But there are other problems. A crucial one in my mind is the moral construction of the universe that myths and other stories exist to provide--what they tell us about why things happen. In one of the adolescent-hero stories, a boy guarding his salmon trap is abducted by the grizzly who has been wrecking the trap and stealing the fish. Back at home, the grizzly kills his "slave" and feeds him to a group of invited guests, who are various predatory animals of the forest. But after the meal, the wolves feel badly for the boy and have everyone vomit up their meal. They bring the boy back to life and he returns home with spiritual treasure from the bear's house.

If how you make your living becomes your model of cosmology, and all over the world it usually is, one model for Native American religions is hunting. A hunter has to show agency by going out into the forest or onto the ocean to search for game, but some days the animals show themselves and sometimes they do not. The word 'hero' in English has connotations of power and domination, but that is not the moral framework within which the wolves decide to exercise their power of resurrection. The animals are the powerful ones, spiritual beings whose masks of flesh and fur are only a portion of their whole selves. The salmon come to the human realm with all their wealth because they choose to.

My dictionary glossed the Kwak'wala root describing what the wolves had done as 'to pity.' My adviser, Dell Hymes, who was in his own way a committed Christian, used the word "grace" to talk about this kind of encounter with the spirit world in Native American myth. I eventually chose "show mercy" in part for syntactic reasons. At any rate, I would venture to say that in the Western moral framework--what Campbell is essentially dealing in--the pity and mercy shown by the powerful supernatural for the powerless hero is not the core of what heroism means.

For those interested in universalism, one place to start would be Marcel Mauss' Rites of Passage and the work of Victor Turner on liminality that takes off from Mauss. With regard to heroism and adventure fantasy, the moral frameworks within which stories construct and convey meaning are ones that we might pay closer attention to. I say that in part from having lived so long with some Native American traditions trying to understand what the stories aimed to say about the world--about balance, for example, as opposed to acquisition and domination. Dell addressed some of this in his several articles on Charles Cultee's story "The Sun's Myth" (no links outside of JSTOR, alas), which he took in part to be a devastating commentary on the consequences of embracing the white man's materialism. It's a story in which the hero's heedless quest for the Magical Object brings about the destruction of his entire people.

Campbell, part 1: Homeless Cinderella, Murdered Toad Kids, and Other Non-Western Non-Archetypes

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 05:29:01 GMT

And, in the spirit of catching up, two recent Black Gate posts aimed in the direction of Joseph Campbell. Last week's:

As an anthropologist specializing among other things in myth and folk literature, and as a writer who has sat on many a con panel on myth, fairy tales, quest stories and the like, I often have to wrassle the monsters Monomyth, Universal Archetype, and their lesser-known littermates, who have been spawned by Joseph Campbell and other Jung-influenced writers.

The monomyth, a word Campbell took from James Joyce, is essentially a proposed universal structure underlying the hero's journey, with phases that include The Call to Adventure, Refusal of the Call, Supernatural Aid, Crossing the Threshold (into the magical realm), and so on. What's wrong with the monomyth? There's no doubt that pieces of it are found not only in a huge percentage of fantasy fiction, but also in widely scattered mythic and folk literary traditions all over the world.

However. Is it universal?

Methodologically, what both Campbell and Jung have done is cherry-picking, and often from texts that have already been translated and/or rewritten to conform to Western notions of what makes a satisfying story. Let me start with an example of the latter.

You can find online a tale called "The Indian Cinderella" taken from a book called Canadian Wonder Tales by Cyrus Macmillan. Geez, it really does resemble the classic Cinderella story! Macmillan's source was a tome by Charles Leland of seeming scholarly authenticity, called The Algonquin Legends of New England, first published in 1884 and reprinted by Dover a couple of times over the last 25 years. There, the story is titled "The Invisible One," and Leland cites his source, Silas Rand's Legends of the Micmacs. Rand was a missionary and scholar who lived among the Micmac, and he collected his version in the Micmac language from one of his parishioners--in the 1860s, if my memory is serving me correctly. His version was originally titled "The invisible boy: Team' and Oochigeaskw." (I don't think it is online anywhere.)

Many changes in language and structure took place as the story was progressively re-anthologized. The biggest single change is that Leland's version left off the whole second half of Rand's original English translation. Now, one widespread formal characteristic of North American indigenous literature is that stories often have two halves, with the second one being a commentary or reflection on the events of the first. The half of the story that has been anthologized and cited as proof that the Cinderella story is to be found everywhere does indeed have a despised heroine who nevertheless wins the most desirable husband; she proves to be the only one who can see what the great hunter with the spirit power of invisibility is carrying. This half is about acquiring. But the second, omitted half of the story is about what happened next: the hunter with spirit power dies, and first the "Cinderella" girl and then the sister of the hunter, through carelessness, violating taboos, etc., manage to lose everything. This was the point of the story to the original story teller--the importance of proper behavior with respect to the spirit world--not the happy Cinderella ending.

The Cinderella version is much more satisfying to Leland and Macmillan's intended audiences and, we could presume, to them as well. But it wasn't what the original story was about. This kind of rewriting is more the norm than the exception when Native American traditional stories get anthologized, and I would bet it happens with other non-Western traditions as well. Stories that can't be wrestled into a satisfying pattern don't tend to even make it into the anthologies. Everyone knows some version of the Frog Prince story, right? On the north Pacific coast a widespread story has a high-ranking girl, who has refused all suitors. insulting a frog or toad. Then she meets a most handsome young man and goes away with him, vanishing from the sight of her people. Later two small frogs/toads come hopping into her father's town and for one reason or another, according to the version, are clubbed to death because they aroused human disgust. They prove to be the girl's sons; the handsome prince actually was a frog. The Native story is a tragedy not a romance, and the lesson is about the importance of treating even frogs with respect.

What about non-Western heroic quests? This post is getting long, and I'll continue on that topic next time. The short version is, even stories that seem familiar might be about something quite different.

Blog Gate linkage

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:41:48 GMT

Still more on female fighters. My personal opinion remains: Theo doesn't understand martial arts beyond the hitting part.

The Edge of the World

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:31:04 GMT

It's been a long time since I read Swanwick's "The Edge of the World," but in my not always reliable memory the edge in that story is located somewhere in the middle east. I don't feel quite as if I have wished myself out of existence as per Swanwick, but I have been feeling as if I've tipped over the edge and am still falling. I just went to catch up on my flist and discovered it had been so long since I'd done so that I couldn't even read back to where I last left off. My email inbox is a disaster. Weird disconnections are starting to happen: when I hear an American voice on the radio or street, I think, what a strong accent.

It's probably not helped by the fact that I've been sick for the past week-plus. Still no actual job, though it's looking as if I'll be teaching a short writing course and some freelance possibilities are looming closer in the fog. No fiction writing to speak of, either. Job applications and trying to make myself look good on job applications (like finishing an academic article now a year overdue) have been taking what time there is.

Days are getting longer and now the first call to prayer from the mosque behind our building starts before 5:30 a.m. It says something about something that I am now regularly awake before that, as now. If I were to look at what's in my glass as opposed to what's missing (not my usual mode, alas), an item that should go on the list is, one of the guys who does the call has a beautiful voice, so beautiful that each time I have to stop and listen.

Verisimilitude and the Woman Warrior, With Some Relevance to Fantasy Tropes

Tue, 10 Feb 2009 05:28:44 GMT

This week at Black Gate:

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I had thought to dive today into Joseph Campbell on the hero and the so-called monomyth--another irritant that, one could wish, might aid in the production of a pearl of wisdom. I have been distracted, however, by a self-labeled polemic on the topic of fictional women as kick-ass fighters that referenced my post of two weeks ago. Which put me in mind of a long-running, intermittent sort-of argument I've had with the most excellent sf writer pointoforigin, a long-time student of tae kwon do, as to whether women really could go up against men in combat and win before the invention of that great equalizer, the gun. My position is yes, provisionally.

Tomoe Gozen, 12th-century female samurai.

First of all, let me say that I mostly agree with the aforementioned polemic (which is not on the subject of women fighters generally). I certainly agree that Laila Ali's physique is much more believable for a woman fighter than the lollipop figure favored in Hollywood actresses (huge head, stick neck and body). Secondly, let me say that I have no street cred as a fighter. In my 25+ years in the martial arts, I've never used it outside the dojo, unless you count last summer when I tripped hard on the sidewalk and actually rolled instead of landing in a bone-breaking crash. However, one of my seniors had come to our aikido school as a street fighter--in a South Philly gang, family members in the mob, etc.--and also after many years in other martial arts, so I feel free to rely on his insights and conclusions. Moreover, though this was in dojo conditions--meaning at the minimum that you know you are about to be attacked--I have many times successfully thrown and/or pinned men who are significantly taller, heavier, and stronger. So my thoughts on women fighters are not totally pulled out of a dark and hidden orifice.

All people, male or female, have physical limitations. Some people are short and light; others are big and slow, or have bad knees, or no flexibility in their shoulders, or have trouble thinking in 3-D. In the martial arts, and I have to assume in real combat, you have to go with the body you've got. Techniques that will be very effective performed by physique A against physique X won't work nearly as well for physique B against physique Y. Sure, you train to be able to do them all, but you won't be able to do them all equally well against every type of opponent.

Some of the great masters of aikido and aiki-jujutsu, its parent art, have been very small men. The founder of modern aikido, Morihei Ueshiba, was too small to meet the height requirements of the Japanese army. His aiki-jujutsu teacher, Takeda-sensei, was under 5', if I am remembering correctly, but spent the chaotic years after the Meiji Restoration wandering through Japan testing his sword-fighting skills (his portrait shows he lost his front teeth along the way). The founder of the Yoshinkan, Gozo Shioda, couldn’t have been much more than 5′2″ and was skinny and a chain smoker to boot. I saw him demonstrate and took a clinic with him a year or two before his death. He literally hobbled onto the stage, and then trashed his 26-year old uke, who was about 8 inches taller and a hundred pounds heavier. Shioda-sensei was not using strength or agility, but focus, timing, and precision.

One of the concepts in aikido which applies to all martial arts is ma-ai, or ai-ma--I've never been clear if the word order makes a difference in emphasis--which means, roughly, harmonious or appropriate distance, or harmony in time and space. One aspect of ma-ai in aikido is, it's the distance at which the technique is effortless. But every martial art has its characteristic ma-ai. For aikido, it's basically at arm's length; for judo it's much closer. For karate or tae kwon do, ma-ai might be further away. I've watched female judo practitioners throw male judoka, but I know for myself I wouldn't want to let anybody stronger than me get that close, grab shoulders, torso, etc. Keeping at arm's length means you don't have to rely on upper body strength, and that's one limitation most women share. The mechanics of aikido use hand or arm not as a weapon in and of itself, but to transfer and/or re-direct energy generated elsewhere. The saying in aikido is that you need only be able to generate 15 pounds of pressure with your arms and hands for effective technique, and it's true if you're doing the technique correctly.

So how to create fictional women fighters of some verisimilitude? For one thing, she would know her limitations, or at least be learning them. Karate-like techniques, especially kicks that depend more on lower body strength, would be effective and appropriate in some but not all situations. Anything that involves grappling will also be an opportunity for our hero to confront, and hopefully transcend her limitations. My aforementioned street-fighting senior's advice would be to, as my son's classmates are currently phrasing it, kick him in the weenie. On the other hand, I once saw a karate brown belt accidentally knock out her sandan opponent with a single punch, and I bet Laila Ali could do it to you. (My sister and I were once unloading 100-lb bags of cement from a boat. The 60+-year old wife of the fisherman who had brought it over, after watching us for a while, came over and hefted one of the bags. "Oh, not too heavy, then," she said. Women who've spent their lives in physical activity, as opposed to those of us who've done it only avocationally, can be quite strong.)

What about women and bladed weapons? In samurai families, the weapon women usually trained in was the naginata, a kind of glaive, which I imagine does require a certain amount of upper-body strength. Long swords are quite heavy, which is not to say that some women couldn't be effective with them, but they would also know their limitations. The thing about ma-ai, though, applies to weapons, too. A sword can only cut or stab the opponent who is neither too far away nor too close. Aiki-jujutsu developed originally as a resource for samurai who had been disarmed in battle. Many of the techniques are basically the same against an armed as against an unarmed opponent, and involve moving inside the sword's range, to the (unarmed) arm's-length distance. Knife-against-sword techniques have the same requirement; you have to create the ma-ai within which you are more effective than your opponent. And timing, as we say, is everything... not strength. A woman fighter will either know or have to learn these things.

One final thing about swordsmen, swordswomen and muscle. Muscle development in excess can be detrimental. Men who do a lot of weight training tend to get too stiff and top-heavy. A lower center of gravity allows a more balanced stance for both sword and unarmed techniques. Also, too strong a grip on your opponent, or on your sword, “freezes” you. There’s a story about a bandit who had defeated many samurai. Someone asked him his secret, given that he’d had no training. He said that he tapped the samurai’s sword with his own and if the other person was gripping hard, knew his technique was no good and went ahead and killed him. If the other person had the correct sticky-but-not-hard grip, the bandit could tell the samurai knew what he was doing and ran away.

The Wizard Howl

Tue, 03 Feb 2009 02:46:49 GMT

At Black Gate this week:

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Animator Hayao Miyazaki is one of my favorite directors, and Spirited Away (Sen to Chihiro no Kamikakushi) one of my favorite movies of all time. Princess Mononoke is also wonderful, and My Neighbor Totoro a sublime children's film. Packing for Dubai, with extreme space limitations, I made room for the smallish plush catbus a friend brought me from Japan.

Diana Wynne Jones is one of of my favorite fantasy authors. I had originally intended to devote this week's post to her work. Then I watched Howl's Moving Castle for the second time--the first since reading the DWJ novel it is based on. I should love it, right?

The movie Howl has many excellent qualities. Like Mononoke and Sprited Away, the animation is beautiful and well worth seeing on the big screen. The war footage, with the monstrous dreadnought airships and wizards in the shape of winged demons, is accomplished with the usual Miyazaki flair with all things aerial. The love story between Sophie, transformed by the Witch of the Waste into a 90-year-old crone, and the literally heartless Wizard Howl, seemed reasonably satisfying the first time around. The moving castle is just plain fun, and Billy Crystal does an OK Calcifer, if you accept that Calcifer is a cute, friendly little fire demon. (And that's Lauren Bacall as the Witch of the Waste.) If you haven't watched it, do so, but also check out Miyazaki's other, better movies. To be fair, Miyazaki only came on board after the initial director bailed on the project, so its flaws may not be all his doing.

For me, though, the book tells a far more interesting story. It's not just that, as DWJ notes in more recent editions of the book, that Miyazaki made Sophie and Howl into gentler and nicer people. Or that he subsumed the human interest in the story in order to develop his pacifist theme. It's that every character and plot element is more nuanced, complex, and plain dangerous in the original. Howl starts out a cowardly, womanizing drama queen; Calcifer untrustworthy and secretive. He's a freaking captive demon, for goodness' sake!

Sophie, the POV character, is nosy, impulsive, and officious, and also much more active than in the movie, and stronger. She sets the story in motion by (albeit without realizing it) imbuing the hats she trims for a living with magic that changes the wearer's life. At every stage she alters her environment with often drastic consequences. Part of her arc is her discovering she is in fact a powerful witch and has to be more careful with her powers. That large chunk of plot is taken out of the movie, where she doesn't do much more than cook, clean, and take care of the male characters.

Admittedly the novel had to be simplified for the screenplay, but without the Wales sections of the book--completely removed from the movie--Howl is pretty much a cipher. And I missed the book's self-consciousness about fairy tale cliches...

Castle in the Air (not to be confused with Miyazaki's Castle in the Sky) is billed as a sequel to Howl, but is really a stand-alone story about a carpet merchant in an alternate Baghdad, who becomes tangled with a threadbare magic carpet, a beautiful princess, a maleficient djinn, the usual DWJ assortment of toxic and/or useless relatives, and eventually Howl and Sophie. It's also good, although to my mind DWJ tends to shortchange her story climaxes (Howl being no exception). House of Many Ways is supposedly an actual sequel, but the pub date is 2008 and I haven't yet laid my hands on a copy. See the movie! It's entertaining enough. Then read the book. It is entertaining, complex, funny, and memorable.

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 02:59:54 GMT

Via frostokovich, Peter Singer on military robotics and the near future of war.

More than just removing humans from risk, these technologies record everything that they see. So they reshape the public's relationship with war. This has given rise to what soldiers call "war porn." You get some clip of the UAV blowing someone up in an email, as if it's a joke. There are 7,000 video clips of combat footage out there for anyone to download, put to music, etc.

Crane whacks the Doctor's bus!

Sat, 31 Jan 2009 02:55:32 GMT

So they have to rewrite the script.

A Rather Cranky Post on Verisimilitude in Fantasy

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 05:55:35 GMT

This week's Black Gate screed.

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I am one of the few who saw Conan the Barbarian on its first release. The theater was the now-demolished but then-infamous theater in downtown Philadelphia that one commentator referred to as the Budco Take-Your-Life-In-Your-Hands Goldman theater. Our Conan experience at the Goldman was not life-threatening, if you don't count my feelings as I watched Schwarzenegger, too 'roided-up to hold a sword with both hands--although my now-spouse did find a large knife under his seat, which he handed over to the management. We were the lone viewers except for one other man who, whenever Sandahl Bergman brandished her sword, began to exclaim, "She's hot, oh, man, oh, baby, she's hot!"

This space has seen several posts over the last few weeks on the topic of fantasy and realism. Today I'd like to gnaw on another bone, and that is fantasy and verisimilitude. Swordsmanship is a good enough place to start. Now, a confession. I am no master of the sword and know basically nothing about European styles, and I have not touched a bokken since arriving in Dubai. I do, however, have a basic understanding of Japanese sword work, and have done tens of thousands of sword cuts in my life, a few even with a genuine medieval samurai sword. I have learned from experience why the Japanese invented shiatsu. So, all that swinging and whirling swordsmen do before they actually have at it? Imagine your life is threatened and what you have to defend yourself with is a cast-iron frying pan. Are you going to play like a majorette with a baton? Or conserve your strength, block if you need to, and watch for a chance to hit your attacker with it very hard? Swordswomen are another topic that makes me cranky. I've been a martial artist for nigh on 30 years, and I have no doubt of the the capacity of women to be effective fighters, but most women will never have the upper body strength that men can develop, and unlike men can't substitute power for good technique. See: frying pan analogy.

What is the obligation of a fantasy writer to supply verisimilitude? None, really; a writer's job is to tell a story. Is it bad for adventure fantasy to be thinly disguised wish fulfillment? I mean, we all need some in our lives. With swordswomen and other woman warrior figures, I'm completely down with presenting women as powerful and physically capable--as heroes rather than stock victims. The problem for me comes when writers supply false information. A best-selling YA series has a couple of spunky teen girls proving themselves as warriors--but omits all mention the real physical hurdles they would have to overcome as women. Because girls and women are so often the victims of physical violence in our society, it's a disservice to pretend you don't need more than spunk to defend yourself against a strong, aggressive male.

And, OK, if a writer is literate enough to write and publish a book, couldn't he or she manage some basic research into natural history and astronomy? There is enough ignorance in the world without broadcasting more through sheer laziness. A passage in a fantasy novel I read recently described the crescent moon setting at sunrise. Now, class, why is this impossible? Because the crescent (waning or waxing) moon lies between the line of the earth's orbit and the sun, which is why we can't see the whole lit orb. Even if you can't picture how they all move (and I can't mostly), simple observation will tell you that the full moon rises at sunset while the thinnest crescents rise in the morning. Alas, this type of error is not a rare occurrence in the genre.

Horses, OMG horses! How long can a horse gallop before it founders from exhaustion? I don't know, but I'm not going to find out with my horse, unless I'm trying to kill it. If I ever really need a figure for a story I will research it, but meanwhile my fudging rule is that if an athletic person can't do it, a horse won't be able to, either. Of course, human beings can run a very long time if they train. Never mind marathoners--the Tarahumara of Mexico hunt deer by running them down. A human being can't run faster than a deer, but can run longer. Note I said longer, not faster--have your horse trot rather than gallop.

I've sat through enough panels where cranky sf writers sneer about fantasy being easy "because you can just make everything up." I am an annoying geek on the topic of verisimilitude, and my workshop's catchphrase for this habit is "the age of menarche." I've forgotten the instances where I brought this up, but apparently it was more than once, because now they mock me with the words. The point must have been something to do with the nutritional status of people who make their living via subsistence agriculture. An otherwise useless factoid stuck in memory since graduate school: the average age of menarche (onset of menstruation) for girls in Sweden in the 19th century was seventeen; teenagers as we know them are a product of high fat consumption. World commodity trade patterns are another issue that arouses my inner pedant. Where did early iron-age pseudo-Celts get the coffee and the sugar they are humping with them on their quest?

Americans are famously ignorant but even those, like Britney Spears, who think Canada lies overseas, usually know quite a bit about something. One of the strongest arguments for verisimilitude is that if you get something very wrong and readers know it, they lose faith in the rest of what you're telling them. In Iain Banks' Excession--OK, sf not fantasy--there is an unresolved relationship issue that supplies the overall character-development arc of the book. The reader is introduced early on to the woman in the relationship, who has remained nine months pregnant for forty years... The author obviously never ran this by a woman who had had a child. No woman would voluntarily remain nine months pregnant for two more hours, never mind forty years. I disbelieved everything else about those characters for the rest of the book. The author had squandered his credibility when he should instead have been convincing me he could tell no lie.

A reference work I recommend to every aspiring fantasy writer (and an amusing read for others) is Diana Wynne Jones' The Tough Guide to Fantasyland. She takes on horses there along with stew, taverns, bare-chested northern barbarians, and many other non-verisimilitudinous institutions of fantasy. Fantasy is made-up stuff, but to tell me a story you have to make me believe in it.

The Doctor in Dubai

Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:25:12 GMT

Alas, the web version of the story doesn't have the pic of the Tardis on the helipad atop the Burj al-Arab.

Adventure Fantasy in the Children's Section: Rick Riordan

Tue, 20 Jan 2009 05:41:38 GMT

Obama inaugural Black Gate post (no thematic connection... I don't think):

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My first encounter with mythology was, so far as I can remember, via an older brother's copy of Edith Hamilton's Mythology: Timeless Tales of Gods and Heroes (1942). In retrospect the title is presumptuous, as it covers only only the Greek, Roman and Norse mythoi, but at the time I didn't know how many cultures around the world had traditional stories about gods, monsters, and, sometimes, human heroes encountering them. Moreover, as I later came to understand, her sources for these most familiar versions of the Greek stories (other than Homer) were often the Roman retellings dating to the pomo Imperium--were what we might now call fantastic literature rather than genuine myth. Be that as it may, these were my first myths, and I read all I could get my hands on in the children's section of our library.

So when I opened Rick Riordan's The Lightning Thief, it was with a sense of coming home, in the best possible way. The central premise of the hugely entertaining book and its nearly as enjoyable sequels (titled collectively Percy Jackson and the Olympians) is that the Greek gods, and all the monsters of Greek myth as well, are as active today as in antiquity. Since Olympus follows Western civilization around, it currently occupies the six-hundred-and-sometieth floor of the Empire State Building in Manhattan. The Greek gods are still as, er, prone to falling in love with mortal women as ever, with all the resulting demigod heroes/troublemakers you might expect. However, because demigods have such a poor prospect of reaching adulthood, the Olympians have set up a summer camp on Long Island, called Camp Half-Blood, where prospective heroes can learn survival skills and train for heroic quests. Now, Zeus, Poseidon and Hades took a vow after World War II to abstain from unions with mortal women, because their offspring had come so close to destroying civilization entirely. Think they succeeded in their vow? Meanwhile, there's a prophecy around regarding a child of one of the Big Three, as they are known, such that every monster and minion of Kronos (who is scheming to reassemble himself and escape Tartarus) is out hunting for such a child in order to destroy him or her.

The first person narrator of the books, Percy Jackson, has been kicked out of one school for troubled kids after another, most often for highly destructive incidents involving water. Chapter One, "I Accidentally Vaporize My Algebra Teacher," tells of the events that eventually lead to his discovery that he is the half-blood son of Poseidon. Chiron (disguised as his classics teacher) and his buddy Grover Underwood (a satyr, also in disguise) manage to get him safely to Camp Half-Blood, where he meets other sixth-grade demi-gods, including Annabeth, brainy offspring of Athena, and Clarissa, mean-tempered and aggressive daughter of Ares, along with Chiron in his true form and Mr. D (Dionysus, played by Jack Nicholson), who runs the camp as part of a punishment inflicted by Zeus. There Percy learns that all demigods are, like him, dyslexic (Ancient Greek is the only language that they can read without difficulty) and suffer ADHD (it's because of their divinely heightened reflexes). And there he hears about the theft of Zeus' Master Lightning Bolt. Naturally, it falls to him, Annabeth and Grover to retrieve it and uncover the thief.

Percy's voice is one of the great pleasures of the books. Another is the way Riordan inserts the Greek gods and monsters into the present-day US. The entrance to the Underworld is in an LA recording studio; Poseidon dresses like a beach bum. Guess which monster of classical antiquity runs a garden statuary shop in suburban Connecticut? One of my favorite scenes takes place in a later book, when Percy is rescued from yet another sticky situation by a cab driven by the Graiae, who, of course, possess only one eyeball between them, which they pass back and forth as they careen through Manhattan traffic. For this reader, the humor in it nearly always succeeds, in spades--the bit about the two argumentative snakes, George and Martha, who are wrapped around Hermes' cell phone didn't quite work for me, but my son loved it. Did I mention the books are action-packed?

Ares sneered.

He swung the baseball bat off his shoulder. "How would you like to get smashed, ancient or modern?"

I showed him my sword.

"That's cool, dead boy," he said. "Classic it is." The baseball bat changed into a huge, two-handed sword. The hilt was a large silver skull with a ruby in its mouth.

"Percy," Annabeth said. "Don't do this. He's a god."

... Ares came toward me, his black leather duster trailing behind him, his sword glinting like fire in the sunrise. "I've been fighting for eternity, kid. My strength is unlimited and I cannot die. What have you got?"

A smaller ego, I thought, but I said nothing. I kept my feet in the surf, backing into the water up to my ankles...

Riordan has published five in the series so far, and I get the feeling he's running out of creative energy; he's also used up a lot of the best myths and monsters, although in his universe, monsters never die permanently. The more recent ones are still entertaining, though, and it's hard for me to imagine an adult who loves fantasy who wouldn't enjoy the books. Kids have made them bestsellers. This last summer, my son was reading the latest as we queued at the post-office passport window. A family with two sons waited behind us. The older boy saw what my child held in his hands and started reading over his shoulder, shifting position every time he moved to keep his eyes on the page. Soon all three were seated on the floor by the wall, reading the book together and energetically discussing their favorite scenes from the series. Who says kids won't read?

More Thoughts on Realism and Fantasy

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:39:50 GMT

This week's Black Gate screed:

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Though I've understood since childhood that not everybody shared my love of the fantastic, it wasn't until quite a ways into my adult years that I realized this must be in large part due to differences in how people's imaginations operate. One spur to this realization was an on-air comment by a local arts-and-culture talk show host that she couldn't get into a book where things happened that couldn't in real life (yes, a statement we could unpack at length). At the time I was observing my young son discover stories. It was clear to me that he derived some of the greatest pleasure from precisely those things that never could happen in real life. Moreover, the stories he invented to tell me from two years onward (which I wrote down whenever I could) were gleefully fantastic: night being stolen, his father putting on breasts, the street sucking our house off its foundations. From watching his friends I also was able to see that not all kids do love the fantastic equally; he was close to one end of some bell curve. When the differences show up so early, they start to look like something innate.

The term mimesis is sometimes used to describe techniques of realistic fiction--as imitation, in other words, of something that already exists. All kinds of questions occur here with regard to how people, whether adults or small children, form judgments about what real life consists of and what constitutes an imitation of it, or a violation of its principles. Many of these principles are culturally constituted. Laura Bohannon's much-anthologized article, "Shakespeare in the Bush," describes how the Tiv rejected Hamlet as unacceptably unrealistic, on the basis of, among other things, the motivations of nearly every character. Others arise out of an individual's experience. For those born with synaesthesia, there would be nothing at all unreal about descriptions of numbers possessing color, or (my own case) sounds having a tactile component.

According to Wikipedia, imagination is a "term is technically used in psychology for the process of reviving in the mind, percepts of objects formerly given in sense perception." In this view, in other words, imagination is mimetic in the purest sense--it "revives in the mind" what one has already experienced. I suspect that the psychologists initially formulating this definition shared the type of imagination described by our talk-show host. For others like my son and myself, the mind is just as prone, or more so, to gravitate to things that one hasn't experienced, that violate the expectations and principles of real life. The Calvin cartoon in which he has to fend off an attack by his breakfast oatmeal is iconic for me in this regard.

What is that about? In a superficial search of JSTOR, and various science-news sites including New Scientist, Science News, and Discover Magazine, I couldn't discover any neuroscience research that related to the pleasure experienced through imagining impossible things. The late great sociologist Erving Goffman, on the other hand, did write at some length in his book Frame Analysis on what he termed "negative experience." By this he meant not bad, evil experiences, but rather what happens when our cognitive frames that tell us "what's happening now?" are broken in one way or another. It's comparable perhaps to the concept of negative space in visual art. He quoted a news-filler item about a family who'd moved into an apartment with a lumpy sofa. They came back from vacation to discover the lumps had disappeared... but they now had a large python coiled behind their refrigerator. That moment of shock when the old interpretation dies and one's notion of reality is in wild flux is one of the things he called negative experience. But he discussed all kinds of other places where people found and even sought it out, including art and humor.

To go all dialectical for moment, formulating a cognitive frame of what something is (for example, oatmeal) necessarily brings into being the possibility of all the things it is not (for example, dangerously animate slime). Like a glass of water that can according to the viewer be either half empty or half full, the experience of life is for some primarily about what something is, and for others, quite often about what something is not. Metaphor, of course, is the bridge between the impossible and meaningfulness.... The experience of coping with the sliminess of oatmeal, in the defenseless mental state of early morning, can seem like an encounter with something dangerously animate, especially if it would be much more fun to imagine that the oatmeal is alive. One can suppose that this inability of the mind (some minds) to stop playing with cognitive frames is the root of much fantastic literature.

I don't mean by all of this to separate humanity into those of us who love fantasy and the plodding mundanes who will read only the most boring of mainstream fiction. As in many things, human beings exhibit a bell curve of variation. Moreover, fantasy is everywhere in mainstream fiction, and mimesis is everywhere in fantastic fiction, and much as I identify with Calvin, I still most of the time manage to eat breakfast without too many horror-story scenarios glimmering in the morning fog.

More camels

Mon, 12 Jan 2009 05:21:20 GMT

Outdoor pictures here are hit-or-miss because of the light and my primitive photography skills. Almost every picture I took on the RAK trip was by necessity nearly straight into the sun.

Man on bicycle herding camels near Rams, Ras Al Khaimah.

Usage Dept. II

Wed, 07 Jan 2009 05:37:30 GMT

Adventure Fantasy in the Children's Section: Garth Nix

Mon, 05 Jan 2009 12:21:14 GMT

This week's Black Gate post:

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Recently, on a writer listserv I'm on, discussion veered to how to turn kids in general, but boys in particular, into avid readers. The general consensus from the parents on the list was: limit screen time, whether TV, games, videos; find books they are interested in; and read to them every day. On the topic of how to find books, one father of two boys in particular recommended the authors Patricia Wrede, Diana Wynne Jones, and Garth Nix, saying that he hadn't considered the gender of the authors or the main characters, he just knew his kids would love their books, and they had. I would certainly second his recommendation. There is plenty for adults to enjoy, too.

Garth Nix, who is this year's Guest of Honor at the World Fantasy Convention, is my 9-year-old son's favorite author, and the one who easily topped his "what books would you want with you on a desert isle" list. (Here in Dubai, we are on a desert peninsula, not isle, but given how expensive books are, the feeling is sometimes the same.) Having been given a size and weight limit by his parents, he filled it mostly with Nix's Seventh Tower and Keys to the Kingdom series.

The former consists of six slim volumes that would add up to a decent-sized tome in the adult section. It's set on a pair of worlds, one, Aenir, the source of magic and spirits, the other, where humans live, in perpetual darkness except for the magical Sunstones that come from Aenir. Residents of the seven-towered Castle on the human world must each acquire and enslave a spiritshadow (exchanging it for their own natural one) via a quest to Aenir in order to achieve any status. The story begins when one of the main characters, Tal, has to steal a Sunstone from the top of one of the towers in order to heal his sick mother. He falls off the tower, out of the Castle, and into the wider world where his people are considered evil sorcerers.... It's fast-paced, very readable, with humor, plot complications, and interesting characters and world-building, if (to an adult) a rather familiar overall plot trajectory.

The Keys to the Kingdom has the feel of being aimed at a slightly older audience; the books are thicker, the plot, though still very fast-paced, has more strands, and there are quite a few more important characters. The world-building is one of the chief pleasures for me--but they aren't books to give to anyone literal-minded about Catholic cosmology. This universe was created by a (female) Architect who then departed for an unknown destination, leaving her creation and the seven Keys to the same in the hands of her seven immortal Trustees and a Will (lots of capitalization in the book). The Will stipulates that a mortal should inherit her position and the Keys. The Trustees immediately tear up the Will, imprison the animate scraps, and divide up the universe for themselves. Each can manifest in the Secondary Realms, where we mortals live, only on one day of the week, and so takes his or her title from that day. Each, as soon as the Will is overturned, becomes afflicted with one of the seven deadly sins.

At the start of Mister Monday, the first book, a scrap of the Will escapes. Fearing the consequences, slothful Trustee Monday tries to follow the letter of the Will by turning over a part of his Key to a boy, Arthur Penhaligon (surely no association with another Arthur intended). Arthur is suffering from a severe asthma attack, and Mister Monday thinks he will be able to retrieve the Key as soon as Arthur dies. The Key, however, saves Arthur's life and marks him as the Architect's heir. Arthur is launched on an adventure in which he has to gain the Keys, one by one, and the Trustees and their minions try to stop him. Most of the action takes place in the immense and fabulous House, the "epicenter of creation," big enough to contain mountains and oceans, that is populated by Denizens created to record all that happens in the Secondary Realms (think angels as Victorian bureaucrats). The House is falling apart because of the sloth, greed, gluttony, wrath and so on of its Trustees. The final adventure, Lord Sunday--out this January--takes place at the top of the House, in the Incomparable Gardens.

My son has re-read the series thus far at least four or five times and is practically counting the days until Lord Sunday hits the shelves. Is there a stronger recommendation?

Nix's third series, the Old Kingdom books (Sabriel, Abhorsen, Liriel, and two more forthcoming) are aimed at a somewhat older audience, teen to adult. They're set in Ancelstierre, modeled rather on ca. World War I England and, on the other side of the wall, a magical Old Kingdom where time and reality operate differently, whose existence is officially denied by the government of Ancelstierre. The main characters are connected to the line of the Old Kingdom rulers or of the Abhorsens, or both. The Abhorsen has the power to journey into the lands of the dead and combat the dangers arising there, in particular any dead trying to exit back into the realms of the living. The title character of the first book is the teenage daughter of the last Abhorsen, who has disappeared and whom she must rescue. I don't find the world-building as inventive and wackily coherent as in the Keys series, and Sabriel seemed rather predictable page to page, though still quite full of incident and adventure. By the time I reached Liriel, however, reading them was like crack, and I'm definitely looking forward to the next.

In plot and theme, Nix occupies familiar ground; his strengths are in creating fast-paced adventures on imaginatively conceived landscapes. His characters are always enjoyable if not necessarily complex or three-dimensional. The writing is also not his strongest suit, though better than adequate. For most adults I'd probably recommend starting with the Old Kingdom books, but you don't want to miss Arthur and his wild trek through the House, battling the archangels at the epicenter of creation.

Estrangement in RAK

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 06:26:42 GMT

Monday's Black Gate blog entry.

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I haven't checked the news yet to see if our internet links to the rest of the world have been fully restored, but over the last few days enough traffic has been re-routed that I've been able (among other things) to read the Black Gate blog. I had intended to post today about Garth Nix, as the first in what I hope will be an intermittent series on MR/YA adventure fantasy, but yesterday proved to be the Islamic New Year (it's determined by astronomical sightings, not by absolute date), and my spouse had the day off, so we all drove up the coast to the northernmost emirate, Ras Al Khaimah. No time, therefore, to write anything that requires fact-checking.

More of RAK in a minute. Reading James Enge's last post on fantasy and realism led me to further thoughts on the same... for example I don't think they are the strict dichotomy suggested in that post. Like JE, however, I have always felt that there is nothing remotely realistic about my inner life.

But what about external, intersubjective life? The great Soviet fantasist Andrei Sinyavsky, originally published in this country under his pseudonym Abram Tertz, denounced Soviet Realism in his early screed The Trial Begins. Realism, he wrote, is a literary technique that is no longer adequate to describe reality, because reality is no longer realistic. While I agree with that with regard to the present, I'm not sure that reality has ever been realistic. I had a good friend tell me that she thought I probably wouldn't be interested in writing science fiction and fantasy after my son was born. I guessed that she meant that I would be forced to grow up and would then take interest in adult things. I often thought about her comment during pregnancy, because it was the most science-fictional experience I had ever had. It's alive! It's inside me and growing! It's going to be a whole separate human being! I mean, what's more bizarre and fantastic and estranging from the ordinary self than that?

Here in Dubai every day is chock-full of estrangement. It's just like being in the suburban US... except that it's utterly different, that fantasy trope where a familiar landscape has been re-populated by people out of an entirely different mythos. Actually, in the case of Dubai, several different mythoi.

Yesterday we drove from the land of shopping malls, subdivisions, and skyscrapers northward, and first passed walled villas and date plantations, which gave way to desert and occasional herds of goats and camels. We followed E11 north all the way to Rams, which is about 20 kilometers from the Oman border (one of them) and then tried to find a beach to walk on. We passed a man herding camels over the packed sand on a bicycle. Rams itself is on an inlet and has old- (wood) and new-style (fiberglass) fishing boats pulled up on its beach. Parts of the town look reasonably prosperous and others ... are not, being clumps of one-room cinder-block shacks roofed with tin, or even palm fronds. About every block there was a dumpster, and an untethered cow or bull, a dog or two, and several stray cats, all foraging together in spilled bags of trash.

We headed down the coast again to Ras Al Khaimah City, where we found a lovely sand beach with breakers and a sign, "Sand beach is useful for swimming." (On the other side of a jetty: "Rocky beach no swimming.") No one was swimming (mostly only Europeans and their colonial offshoots do so here); but south Asian men in traditional salwar kameez (long shirt and loose trousers) played cricket near the water's edge, and an elderly Arab man in a white robe strolled along the shore, picking up shells and looking at the waves and the sunset. The beach-scape looked very like the Jersey shore... but was utterly not.

Whether or not fantasy is or should be about estrangement could be a long post in and of itself. To go back to the subject of convention in fiction, an argument could be made that much fantasy is more about familiarity than the strange. And yet one of the reasons I love both f and sf is that they have so much room for the strange and the monstrous and the strangely beautiful... which is, from here in side my skull, what both the inside and outside worlds look like.

Writing Tools

Wed, 31 Dec 2008 06:17:53 GMT

Recently there has been some discussion on several lists and blogs I'm connected to about writing ware, of both the soft and hard kind. As someone who's used Word since v.1 was released some time in the Pleistocene (on my sexy 512K Mac), it feels a little like contemplating adultery, but my resistance to the possibility that there might be other tools out there reminded me of the conversation I had with my father (while, of course, asking for help buying a computer) about how much it would help with schoolwork:

Father: What's wrong with a typewriter?
Me: What's wrong with a quill pen?

Scrivener is novel-writing software that I've been hearing about from a number of directions for a while. It is fairly cheap ($40). I'm still using the free 30-day trial version, which has lasted a while because I so often forget to shut down my computer at night these days. I like many things about it, especially the way you can stick pieces of text of any scale (paragraph, scene, chapter, etc.) all over a virtual corkboard, and I think I would love it if the word-processing capabilities were a little more powerful and if you could print directly from it (you have to export it to an actual word-processing program). The way I work with it is so different from my habits with Word that it's hard to tell yet whether it's increased my productivity.

Several people have variously recommended Evernote, Voodopad, and DEVONnote for managing notes, research clippings, bookmarks and the like. None is very expensive. I haven't tried any of them because I'm not in a research phase, and Scrivener also has a place to store research, though it's not hugely versatile.

Finally, I just read a glowing review of the AlphaSmart, a $220 2-pound electronic notebook that runs on AAA batteries (700 hours on 3 of 'em, if you believe their web page). It could solve my annual problem of how to take my writing off the grid with me, at least until solar battery rechargers increase their usefulness in rainy climates and come down in price and I get a laptop that's a quarter the weight of my iBook.