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.

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.

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.