association-list

It’s hard for me to tease out what I don’t like here about this story from what I don’t like about its embed­ded assump­tions about human­ity, Amer­ica, and people.

Like some­one said a couple of sto­ries ago, I am dog-​​tired of first-​​person nar­ra­tives. I am tired of a lot of things, and this story man­ages to hit on a lot of them. So if you strip away the science-​​fiction aspects of the story, you have a slightly sexist and racist reac­tionary stick-​​figure of a pro­tag­o­nist wor­ship­ing his golden idol of a father because his father loves him less than his dogs. I’d have con­sid­ered the father-​​son rela­tion­ship here a cheap, sen­ti­men­tal trick in a better story. Here, the main char­ac­ter is so warped by this unlikely rela­tion­ship that he’s effec­tively emas­cu­lated, despite the fact that he has worlds more power than his father in every con­ceiv­able way. The only way to make the device more crass would be to move it into 1970s Amer­i­can Male Author daddy-​​issue ter­ri­tory by having the kid lust after Mona more and have a painful scene in which the kid dis­cov­ers that his daddy have been ‘com­fort­ing’ her in her grief, after her hus­band died. Suf­fice it to say that I find the char­ac­ters unbe­liev­able, schematic, and uninvolving.

The embed­ded assump­tions are maybe going to be less appar­ent or obnox­ious to the non-​​American people; it might even be West Coast spe­cific. Capitalist/​libertarian-​​oriented, dully US-​​centric, assum­ing that each tech boom will be fol­lowed by another, the coun­try is better than the city, manual work better than intel­lec­tual work, gov­ern­ment is evil when not incom­pe­tent, etc., etc., so on and so forth. It cir­cum­scribes the world declar­ing that while it might be dif­fer­ent, it can never really be better. I am against the golden age, as a human con­cept. The fact that we all feel it says some­thing about us, rather than some­thing about the world. If the story had been a dis­sec­tion of this feel­ing through its blink­ered and backwards-​​looking main char­ac­ter, it might have been some­thing inter­est­ing, but it doesn’t even remain unex­am­ined; it seems to be the explicit posi­tion of the story.

It could be that I am riding my own hobby horses into some­one else’s nar­ra­tive, and taking these things too seri­ously, but the fact remains that improve­ments in the state of the world do have real con­se­quences. To write a story in which the bet­ter­ment of the lives of bil­lions of people is side­lined by the quo­tid­ian drama of the decline of the aged is, in some ways, to entirely miss the point of using a science-​​fictional set­ting. No doubt there are issues of taste at the heart of it. Also there’s an elec­tion coming up, and that always gets my polit­i­cal juices flow­ing and my ide­o­log­i­cal anten­nae quivering.

Even putting aside the ide­o­log­i­cal under­pin­nings of the story, the fail­ures of char­ac­ter would be enough to damn it, all on their own. Prose-​​wise, it feels under-​​baked, larded with a few too many stock phrasings.

Sev­eral years ago, I wrote a story set in a post-​​singularity world, which bore a bit of a family resem­blance to ‘Elegy …’. Mine was pretty bad. There’s a posthu­man guy and another posthu­man about to tran­scend, and a bunch of people trying to stop her from doing it. I never did revise it fully, because I could never con­vince myself that the set­ting wasn’t pre­cisely iso­mor­phic to the same sit­u­a­tion reworked as a fan­tasy, or a super­hero story. Also it con­tained enough Ellisian verbal tics that I wor­ried that Warren would file suit. And also there are the ugly chunks of auto­bi­og­ra­phy and per­sonal opin­ion dropped in there. But those things are fix­able. There might even be a story worth telling in there, but I never could get over the foun­da­tional prob­lem that basi­cally that the set­ting didn’t say any­thing unique, and didn’t reflect inter­est­ingly on the story that I had to tell.

I sup­pose that that fail­ure was the begin­ning of the end of my flir­ta­tion with sin­gu­latar­ian fic­tion. I still enjoy a finely-​​wrought peice of it, but I never could make it work for me, and I was less impressed with work in the sub-​​genre there­after, having strug­gled with the set­ting issues up close and rarely seeing anyone solve them in a sat­is­fy­ing way.

I strug­gle too much, a lot of the time, with the under­ly­ing mean­ings of sto­ries, both the ones I try to write and the ones I read. I don’t think that SFF is required to be alle­gory at all times, or even most of the time. I don’t sub­scribe to Gibson’s theory that all SFF is built around a re-​​framing of some con­tem­po­rary issue or the cur­rent zeit­geist. But I sup­pose I at least expect an argu­ment, a lesson, a pos­si­ble issue, or some­thing to think about.

This story was good. It was coher­ent, it man­aged not to over-​​explain, it was about real-​​feeling people and real­is­tic rela­tion­ships. Rajaniemi has the storyteller’s spark. It was a bit baggy, like it was told at the gran­u­lar­ity of a novel, rather than a short story. It’s sat­is­fy­ingly low on expo­si­tion. There are many moments where the writ­ing is quite nice.

There are two takes on the ending, I think. Either the sky-​​people planned the entire affair to go off the way it did, or they didn’t. I like the former theory better. A bit of the­ater, allow­ing Koso­nen to move on and his son and the quan­tum girl to finally go free in a way that makes them less dan­ger­ous to the people around them (pre­sum­ably they’re reduced some­what by trans­la­tion into poet­i­cal form). The set­ting here then is a neat bit of work, but doesn’t really get behind the story and push. It’s stronger if you’ve read “Deus Ex Homine”, I think.

If the latter is the case, then the story is unfin­ished, the ending makes very little sense, the setup is stupid, and Rajaniemi is betrayed by the allure of his set­ting, much like I was.

There’s a longer dis­cus­sion to be had, now that the sin­gu­lar­ity thing is just about wound down, but I am not sure that this story is the right tee for kick­ing it off.

Story here, for dis­cus­sion here.

As opposed to the first two sto­ries here, I slot­ted this one into my ‘inter­est­ing fail­ures’ cat­e­gory. I did this mostly because I think that it’s a tol­er­a­ble story and a great exam­ple of a major error in genre fiction.

The story here moves along quickly, with deftly sketched char­ac­ters straight out of steam­punk cen­tral cast­ing. We’ve a valet with a secret, an expe­di­tion into an inter­dicted coun­try, vaunt­ing over­con­fi­dence, and even­tu­ally an awak­en­ing to a grave danger. Every­thing flows smoothly and is topped off by a fine action sequence.

And yet… The story is some­how weight­less, taking each ele­ment of the sub­genre that is uses out of the box and plac­ing it just so. Noting new is orig­i­nated and noth­ing is actu­ally said (I sup­pose that one could argue that the state­ment is that aggres­sive hege­mo­niz­ing swarms are bad, or that indi­vid­u­al­ity is impor­tant, or that loy­alty is more impor­tant than kind, but all these seem to go with­out saying). We are told a story. It is fluent, com­plete, and hollow, con­cerned pri­mar­ily with manip­u­la­tion of scenery and fur­ni­ture. No ele­ment of the stan­dard build­ing blocks is ques­tioned, or goes unused (it’s even hinted that some­where out there are magi­cians, although we never seem to see any).

It could be, as some­times seems the case with BCS, that we’re read­ing an open­ing chap­ter or pro­logue, refit­ted into a stand­alone piece while the larger work lan­guishes in draft, but if so, this one needs the coun­ter­weight of the main body to give it weight.

I started this post out as a giant rant against steam­punk, but by the time I’d gotten half-​​way through it, I real­ized that my rhetoric was get­ting pretty famil­iar. The gist:

The free­dom allowed you by work­ing in a well-​​defined genre or set­ting is that you don’t have to spend a lot of time build­ing the world. You can short­cut and infer to your heart’s con­tent, and there is little chance that your reader, if she is suf­fi­ciently famil­iar with the sub­genre within which you’re work­ing, won’t ever get con­fused. You can spend all of your time fill­ing out your char­ac­ters, elab­o­rat­ing your plot, and lay­er­ing mean­ing through­out to enforce your finely honed point. The prob­lem with this this that too many late­com­ers to the steam­punk party are too busy play­ing with the dec­o­ra­tions and “swag­ger­ing sub­myth types made of the finest gold-​​plated card­board” to ever bother with any of this. We get thin, shop­worn char­ac­ters in a generic set­ting (automata, air­ships, and gears, oh my!), walk­ing through mispaced plots whose pri­mary func­tion is to exhibit the clev­er­ness of the writer in coming up with ever more baroque elab­o­ra­tions on the stan­dard genre furniture.

There was more. You should thank me for delet­ing it. But this depic­tion of steam­punk is basi­cally dull. This is not steam­punk at its worst, but all genre writ­ing at its worst. The same point could have been made of the post-​​Tolkein fan­tasy boom from the late 70s to the early 90s (the hang­over of which is still with us today), or the end­less dreary cyber­punk follow-​​ons that have taken up most of the intel­lec­tual air­space in between now and then, or the mini-​​booms in epic fan­tasy, dark fan­tasy, the new space opera, etc., etc., etc.. Para­nor­mal romance and steam­punk are just the latest iter­a­tions and there’s fairly little that’s inter­est­ing to be said about them specif­i­cally. These are basi­cally the pub­lish­ing equiv­a­lent of momen­tum trad­ing. Some­thing equiv­a­lent will always be with us.

There is little to be done while the market is still hungry. But it’s worth the time, I think, to try and ignore the noise, and do our best to amplify the signal, all the while know­ing that it’s impos­si­ble to win.

I see a few ways in here, craft-​​wise.

1: Mis­di­rec­tion

One way swings around that delib­er­ately provoca­tive ending line. We’re asked to fully reimag­ine the movie from the per­spec­tive of the all-​​invading alien mon­ster, pro­tean, agres­sively hege­monz­ing. A mon­ster for whom the very rape cannot have any mean­ing. In the com­ments, Watts says,

Yeah, I went back and forth on that line for exactly the reason you sug­gest: a metaor­gan­ism with­out sex wouldn’t know what rape was. Which is why I intro­duced the “rapist” dialog with Childs’ search­light a couple of scenes ear­lier, during which the mis­sion­ary admits to levels it cannot under­stand in that word. But it does learn con­no­ta­tion of “forced pen­e­tra­tion of flesh”.

Which is enough, I figure, to save that last line. And my ass.

The typ­i­cal con­ven­tion to signal that a word being used is for­eign is to put it in ital­ics. Watts, or Clarkesworld, hasn’t done so here, but I think that it might have been useful to do so, just to empha­size that the crea­ture doing the talk­ing doesn’t actu­ally under­stand the con­cept, but I figure it isn’t strictly nec­es­sary. There’s an argu­ment to be had there, as the con­ven­tion is cer­tainly used earlier:

Later I hid within the bipeds them­selves, and what­ever else lurked in those haunted skins began to talk to me. It said that bipeds were called guys, or men, or ass­holes. It said that MacReady was some­times called Mac. It said that this col­lec­tion of struc­tures was a camp.

The final line sig­nals that we’re not being told the story that we expect we’re being told. We spend the entire story metic­u­lously repick­ing each piv­otal moment of the film, explain­ing why the mis­sion­ary isn’t at fault, how the harm it caused all springs from incom­pre­hen­sion. But at the last we see the rever­sal: the mis­sion­ary does mean to have us all, to release use from death and our tiny, brutish suffering.

The last line is there to tell us that we’re explor­ing ‘evil’ from the inside and that while we’re seeing the other side of the story, the inte­rior inter­pere­ta­tion is entirely con­so­nant with the exterior.

It’s a neat trick.

2: Pacing

Another way to look at it is how to tell a story that most of the read­ers already know in a way that’s com­pelling. Reimag­in­ing is often a ster­ile exer­cise (imag­in­ing is often a ster­ile exer­cise), but find­ing a moti­va­tion for the crea­ture, work­ing a back­story that fits the facts on the ground and enriches, rather than usurps the polt. Whe shuf­fle back and forth between two strains. Missionary-​​as-​​Childs, walk­ing into the long night and think­ing through its expe­ri­ences; and a retelling of the events in the movie, rein­ter­pereted through the newly invented backstory.

Left alone, nei­ther of these threads would work. A simple recount­ing of the story of the movie would leave us bored. What does it matter if the crea­ture is there, sor­row­ing at the hos­til­ity that it encoun­ters? By the same token, its reflec­tions on the dif­fer­ences between its nature and that of the world that it finds itself in are hollow with­out the con­text of the fram­ing story. Com­pellingly writ­ten, sure, but noth­ing but a deci­sion and a small, quiet death happen. It takes a dif­fer­ent kind of artistry to raise this sort of intro­spec­tion out of the level of the dull. It’s unclear whether or not Watts can manage it, but here, hung of the scaf­fold­ing of the other thread, it becomes a sail, rather than a baggy pile of canvas.

3: Crit­ter gonna get ya

Some­thing of the ever­green pop­u­lar­ity of this genre of story is that it makes for almost auto­mat­i­cally com­pelling cinema. Hon­estly, it’s pretty hard to fuck it up too bad. Your char­ac­ters can be paper thin or gilt card­board and no one is going to care. Faults are excused and ratio­nal­ized away by the stark moral dilemma of need­ing to get rid of the mon­ster that is killing every­one one by one. No one really cares that MacReady is a swag­ger­ing jack­ass with silly hair, he’s as close as we’re going to get to a hero, so we’ll root for him as long as he lasts.

One of the things that makes The Thing so sticky in the memory is that the crit­ter might already have got you, but you haven’t real­ized it yet. It’s a break from the stan­dard con­ven­tion. Later betray­als might not be telegraphed, as is a core of the form, because the char­ac­ters are never sure which side they’ll shortly be on.

To some extent, to offer the critter’s per­spec­tive is to defuse the ten­sion some­what. Part of the fear comes from the fact that you never know where the threat is going to come from. I think that Watts does the best thing here. He doesn’t try. He knows that most of the read­ers will know how it comes out, that even if they haven’t seen the movie, they’ll know the form, know the stan­dards. He allows the move­ment and ten­sion of the story to come from a course of rev­e­la­tion walked in a void in the exist­ing story. Who will the crea­ture get next stops being impor­tant. At the time of the telling, every­thing is already over, or almost. Who it will get next stops being the ques­tion, and it starts being, ‘What will it decide, and what will that mean?’.

4: Con­clu­sions

This story more than most is ensnared in nets within nets of mean­ing, right from the workd go. “I am going to rewrite The Thing from the alien’s per­spec­tive”, is a simple enough state­ment. But since the source text for this remix exists in the way it does, you already have threads about cancer and para­noia and our unre­li­able biol­ogy and the feel­ing that death is hunt­ing us all down one by one anyway, all before you write a single word. The colo­nial­ist stinger in the tail adds another layer of dif­fi­culty. I guess what I mean here is that I can’t get past the excel­lence of form and all of the accreted mean­ing to what Watts is trying to actu­ally say. Which may be noth­ing, hon­estly, other than that it’s a fun thing to try and rewrite The Thing from the alien’s perspective.

I recently fin­ished read­ing Shad­ows of the Apt, Book 1 An Empire in Black and Gold (SoA1), on the rec­om­men­da­tion of sev­eral people. Sur­pris­ingly, I found that it was decent, although the prose was noth­ing spe­cial, verg­ing on bad (some of the dialog, like whoa). Still, it was mostly refresh­ing. There wasn’t a ton of vio­lence and there were even some family rela­tion­ships. The basic premise is noth­ing par­tic­u­larly spe­cial, although it’s enter­tain­ingly lit­er­al­ized. I wor­ried, at first that we’d see kinden piled atop kinden in an ever-​​escalating inven­tion fest, but it didn’t actu­ally pan out that way. On the whole, it could have been tighter, but as it was a first novel, and enter­tain­ing enough, I gave it a pass and moved more or less enthu­si­as­ti­cally on to the second.

Unfor­tu­nately, it was nearly unstartable. Rapidly, we get signs that there is going to be the kinden-​​escalation men­tioned ear­lier, we spend too much time with ninja badassery, and then to seal the deal there is some truly embar­rass­ing grade-​​school level concealed-​​information foreshadowing.

First, though, a deeply nerdy nit­pick of the series so far: Having your char­ac­ters wind a ‘clock­work engine’ is required to be less effi­cient than having them pow­er­ing their vehi­cles directly. I real­ize this is fan­tasy but it’s sci­ence so bad that it’s a major dis­trac­tion. What else are you get­ting incred­i­bly wrong?

OK, maybe another one. The major ninja-​​badass of the series uses some sort of mantis-​​claw blade gaunt­let thing which sounds really cool until you spend two sec­onds think­ing about it, then you real­ize that it’s a recipe for a broken wrist and has some dis­ad­van­tage com­pared to a more tra­di­tional sword of the same length.

All right, back to more seri­ous con­cerns and a gen­eral broad­en­ing of the topic.

Ini­tially we spend a lot of time in SoA2 with Tisa­mon and Tynisa watch­ing them fight each other and var­i­ous people and we spend little bit of time with a chilly (not really chill­ing) psy­chotic who has it in for the con­flicted baddy of the first book and seems to ninja every­one nearby to death. As far as I can tell these scenes add exactly noth­ing to the book, save the up the ninja quotient.

At some point, you have Too Many Ninjas. Epic fan­tasy series, this is your bane.

Glen Cook’s Black Com­pany books are arguably the model for all of the books under dis­cus­sion here. Inas­much as they were com­pelling, it was because they dealt pri­mar­ily with real people, albeit tough people in dire cir­cum­stances. If there were ninjas, they were rare and seldom called upon, only to resolve plot points of heav­ily fore­shad­owed near-​​impossibility. They were short and punchy and Cook is a ser­vice­able writer with a very clear con­cep­tion of what skills he does and doesn’t have.

The early Malazan books from Steven Erik­son were great fun. They had Cook-​​ian char­ac­ters that you could relate to as they went their grum­bling, competent-​​but-​​fallible way through this deca­dently over­built world. And Erik­son is a decent writer, so when you finally get to the point where the Ninjas come on screen, he just lets rip, and they tear shit up. It’s pretty great, the way that it comes together in those first few books. Unfor­tu­nately, we’ve only ever got a couple of people we can relate to, and we spend less and less time with them as we go on. More and more people become ninja badasses, which makes them harder to relate to, and ensures that their sto­ry­lines will be fol­lowed up on later, fur­ther bloat­ing a series of books that arrived already over­weight. Although at his best, Erik­son is a finer writer than Cook, he’s less clear on what he’s good at, and the bad stuff (the poetry, the mythopoeic origin/​gods-​​and-​​heroes sec­tions) seems to get more and more pro­tracted. Even­tu­ally you give up, if you’re me. The adjunct Crim­son Guard books fail from the first, because not only are they less well-​​structured and less well-​​written, every­one you meet from page one either dies promptly or is/​becomes a capital-​​N Ninja. It’s hard to share the author’s glee in their cre­ation, because there’s no hook (or rather, there’s the attempt at one, but you don’t get enough time with him because there’s so much other Neat Stuff the author just can’t help but share).

Joe Abercrombie’s First Law books work better, though I give them less weight since struc­turally, they’re not epic fan­tasy in the Cook mold. But while they trade heav­ily in Tolkien sub­ver­sion for struc­ture, they borrow lib­er­ally from the Cook inspired gritty fan­tasy oeuvre, which I think makes them rel­e­vant here. For the most part, Nin­jary is kept off-​​screen or invoked (in the case of Logen) at hor­rific cost to every­one nearby. The super­nat­ural in gen­eral is sparse here, and thus the author feels con­strained to limit his badasses to the merely human, or they’re used as ene­mies to sin­is­ter effect.

So, sug­ges­tions to future writ­ers of epic fan­tasy, be it gritty, dark, or light:

1. Ninjas: err on the side of too few! They may allow for cool scenes but, but they dis­tance your read­ers from the story that you’re trying to tell. The scenes that they allow are also too often hollow dis­plays of show­ing. Either they carry more weight than ‘X fought Y and was (slightly/greviously/un)hurt.’, or it’s just so much spe­cial effects wankery.
2. Ultra­vi­o­lence is near ter­mi­nally over­done! It’s OK to have char­ac­ters who have fam­i­lies and love people and care about things other than honor & skill. Writ­ing a little romance won’t kill you, either.
3. Don’t under­es­ti­mate the qual­ity of writ­ing in terms of making your books easier to read.
4. Shorten it up. I real­ize bloat is the tra­di­tion, but every­one will be better off if you can keep it down to 90-​​100k words or so. Take heart, it means you can sell 20 books instead of 5 – 10! But…
5. Pay atten­tion to the broader struc­ture of your books. You need mul­ti­ple entry points and books that could poten­tially stand alone, oth­er­wise you kind of dis­ap­pear up your own tailpipe when book one goes out of print.

It strikes me that in my last post, that I was some­what non-​​specific in my use of syn­the­sis. It could be that I’m miss­ing out, with regards to knowl­edge of the crit­i­cal lit­er­a­ture, so I wanted to define my terms.

When I call an author an syn­the­sist, I’m mostly refer­ring to what I call their pri­mary mode of extrap­o­la­tion. By pri­mary, I mean the tech­niques that any one author gen­er­ally uses to drive the ideas behind their sto­ries. I’d say that there are at least three broad cat­e­gories here, and I’ll attempt to name them, offer a brief def­i­n­i­tion, and pro­vide some examples.

1. Com­pos­i­tive Sythe­sists: This is a cat­e­gory into which I slot Tidhar, Liz Williams, Wolfe, Delaney, Swan­wick, etc.
   Very few of the ideas are new, and occa­sion­ally things that would oth­er­wise flow nat­u­rally from the world build­ing are missed. Rather they’re used with vary­ing degrees of skill to evoke the set­tings and pre­con­di­tions for their character’s sto­ries to nat­u­rally unfold. Inter­est­ingly, I find that thsi cat­e­gory con­tains both some of the best and some of the worst SF dis­pro­por­tion­ately, going from the bottom, where the paint by num­bers crowd oper­ates, to the top, where some of the best artists of the genre pick and chose just the right ele­ments out of the exist­ing prop box to set the drama of their char­ac­ters and plots off to great­est effect. There are some people in the middle, but they seem to be thin­ner on the ground than in my other (self-​​defined) categories.

2. Con­junc­tive (or Inven­tive) Sythe­sists: These are authors who’re largely work­ing out of the box of stan­dard props and tropes, but they’re inter­ested enough in the ideas that they’re work­ing with that they gen­er­ally con­sider it incum­bent upon them to come up with some fas­ci­nat­ing and novel ideas and cre­ations that shake out nat­u­rally from the quriks of their world­build­ing and how they’re throw­ing their ideas together.
   I’d put Stross, Tricia Sul­li­van, Justina Robson, Bruce Ster­ling, and Richard Morgan here, amongst others.

3. Sub­ject Experts: These are your scientist-​​authors and your lay experts, who take their deep knowl­edge and research and use it to inform either their story ideas or their world­build­ing. They also draw from the common pool, but their unique bodies of knowl­edge lead to both insights and lacu­nae that other writ­ers with a dif­fer­ent speculative-​​extrapolative approach wouldn’t have come across.
   I’d include Ben­ford, Kim Stan­ley Robin­son, Nancy Kress, Vernor Vinge, and a number of others here.