Among yesterday’s many tasks, I had to return a book to the library, where I scored a winner — Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night on cd. Since finishing Donaghue’s late 18th C historical novel, Life Mask I had failed to find any audio book that worked for my work-outs. When I find one, I settle in for several hours for often several weeks — Life Mask was 19 discs that played for about 70 minutes each. It’s hard to transition out of the world that one’s workout has signaled entry into after so long. Finding the right workout book is not easy.

 In any case, I followed Donaghue’s Life Mask on cd, with a print book, Joe Abercrombie’s 15th-century Italian flavored fantasy, Best Served Cold. Along with Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise (also experienced via cd) and Treason’s Shore by Sherwood Smith, these were the novels that held my interest this summer.

Best Served Cold is signally composed with more originality and sharply limned characters than many Fantasies. This isn’t easy to do, since thousands of Fantasy works have been published, and published in ever more numbers every month since LOTR created this new publishing genre — and demographic audience.

 What I liked most about Best Served Cold is the picture it provides of the terrible harm private mercenary armies are to everyone. They are fighting a war for their own profit. They collude with each other to drive up prices, throw battles and wars, betray each other and their employers, create wars where there are none. You have to think about Blackwater and, at last accounting, nearly 200 other private militias that are getting U.S. military contracts. If you ever thought  privatizing a national military is a good idea, you should read this novel of Abercrombie’s, particularly p. 239. But surely there’s no one in these current real world militias who is a classic likeable rogue like the former merc General, Nicomo Cosca, in Best Served Cold.

 Like Jacqueline Carey’s Kushiel’s Mercy (2008), and Sherwood Smith’s conclusion to her Inda series, Treason’s Shore (2009), Best Served Cold is a Fantasy novel that feels infused with current political events and catastrophes.  But readers who read to escape the real world, never fear!  Though this deep connection to contemporary events and conditions is successfully accomplished, none of these works will lose anything in depth or effectiveness as all these events disappear from our national attention deficit disordered mind.

 This may be the first Fantasy novel that has a character of agency who is an autistic, just on the edge of functioning. Friendly has no bonds with other humans, or booty, or power. He’s not likely to commit betrayal. He counts things, anything. His dice are his comfort objects. He is happy and content in prison, where the rigid routine allows him to feel safe. He’s a splendid addition to any group of thugs or soldiers because he loves the dice, and he never miscounts. He’s a methodical killer in a fight or battle, counting, counting, counting. He’s a sudden savage killer when the numbers are wrong or someone has broken his comfort routines. Friendly provokes the reader into thinking about what the chances were back in such times and conditions of autistic persons surviving at all.

Morveer is the chemist/alchemist/master of poisons-for-hire. Morveer reminds one of certain portraits of Merlin, including TNH’s description of the “unreliable magician” in her current “Re-reading Sandman” here, and which others like Kit Kerr have also discussed at different times – Kit has also employed this specifically in her Deverry works. Most of all it is Morveer’s relationship with his apprentice that recall a twisted Merlin, a penetrating reading of that odd end of Merlin’s life with the entry of Viviene, she who wished to learn all his magic and secrets. The Merlin parallel feels most strong around p. 195. However, you will be surprised how this narrative strand plays out.

 The two ‘primary’ characters are the peasant turned mercenary general, the ruthless and brilliant strategist-swordswoman, Monza Murcatto, and Caul Shivers, a Viking sort, who has foolishly followed advice proferred at home and come south to become a better man, rather than a killer and seeker after ephemeral booty. It’s seldom I see actors in the role of fictional characters, but I couldn’t get rid of the image of Shivers as Sex and the City’s Aiden:  hunky, competent, unsizzling personality, dull of expression, and twice jilted by Carrie Bradshaw. There are many more characters than these, but these are the most successful, with the most page time. All of them betray each other and re-align frequently.

 The structure of the novel includes a variety of time periods, a variety of charcters and multi-threaded narrative lines.  These are written with an admirable deftness.  Nor does the prose plod.  The opening section is some brilliant satiric repartee by deeply knowing, profoundly cynical characters who know each other better than they want to, and have loyalty to nothing or anyone. At first you can’t believe what you are reading — you think this author is maybe an untalented sap and you’re going to close the book. But that’s not what is going on. It’s a brilliant bit.  And something that’s included in this bit, is there, at the very end of the novel.

 What was problematical for this reader concerning the novel was the name Abercrombie gave the featured region of his world-building — Styria. My eyes and brain insisted on seeing Syria every damned time, which threw me out of where we are. Nor did it feel like a name that would be found on the 15th Century latinum peninsula, of which this tale of warring city states is so reminiscent — as well as of Mario Puzo’s The Family (2001), featuring the Borgias, with historical characters including Niccolò Machiavelli.

This novel was just about perfect for this reader — see, in ‘my interests’: betrayal. It feels  significantly superior to Abercrombie’s First Law Trilogy. This may be because the world is so emphatically modeled upon a historical time and place, and historical characters. There was more than one very strong female warrior in that period of the warring papal and city states.

 Hopefully, Best Served Cold is the stand-alone work it appears to be.

Really: no it’s not.

First of all: it reads like a newbie mistake (see above). Second of all, the more detailed and lavish the supporting materials are, the more likely the story itself has been shorted, because the writer has gotten so wound up in providing the schematics for the world (and showing you that they’re all, all there!) that she has forgotten things like logic, character, and wordcraft.

This does not mean that the writer should not do her homework, keep charts and research files and maps and whatever else makes it possible for her to construct a world.  But, as I think I’ve said before, 9/10ths of the worldbuilding iceberg should be underwater, unless you want your manuscript to sink like the Titanic.  Even when the work is finished, think carefully about imposing too many maps, etc. on your reader. 

Of course there’s a reason I’m thinking about this.  I just finished reading a quite satisfying fantasy novel, second in a series set in a big, sprawling elsewhere.  The worldbuilding is generally quite satisfactory.  Two problems:

• In the first book in the series the author included a pronunciation guide so that readers would understand how to say the names of characters and places.  The problem with this is that once I read the arcane rules of this language it meant that every time I met a new character I not only had to remember what she looked like, but that her name was pronounced so that the first H was aspirated but the second H was not*, and that U was always pronounced long, as in you, but A was always short as in aaaa. This means, for me as a reader, that I’m doing the equivalent of walking through a new country with a guidebook in my hand, rather than getting involved in the story. In the second book there is no pronunciation guide, but (sadly) I still remember it, and kept trying to sound out the names in the new book by the same rules, rather than just getting into the story.
• Both books have maps. The first book takes place entirely on one continent, and it’s pretty easy to follow the peregrinations of Our Heroine and her dauntless companion once they leave her hometown and set out to save her people from invaders.  But in the second book–because there were maps (not only of the continent but of the world itself) I kept referring back to them. In the second book Our Hero and his dauntless band sail off to save some captives and wind up saving the world and…it’s a good story, full of cool worldbuilding and action and angst and stuff.  Only, I kept trying to figure out where they were on the maps, and got hugely frustrated because I couldn’t: the larger map that compassed his travels did not include the names of the places they visited, so I still have no idea where they started from and only a rudimentary one of where they ended up. But every time the author gave me a new place name I leafed back to the front of the book and tried to find it. Once again, having that supporting material available was a distraction, not an aid.

Not everyone reads as I read, I know.  Many people would skip right over this stuff, or wouldn’t be bothered the way I was.  But some people will be, and for us, it’s a drag.  So think carefully about including your supporting materials with your work, either in ms. form or in the final book.  If someone proposes it, ask yourself (and the proposer) what you want the map to accomplish.  If you’ve built your world solidly enough, readers might not need a map.  And if there are specific reasons (you want a visual reminder of how close the enemy city is to Our Heroine’s wee tiny cot in the woods, or to give some visual cue as to why the journey from Hither to Yon takes six years by carrier yak), make sure that the map is set up to be useful. Because human nature is such that some people are going to try to use it, and hold it against you if they cannot.

*The real pronunciation rules have been changed to protect the innocent.

Fort Freak

Aside from the good feeling of having a proposal accepted, there’s also the writer’s anxiety about writing about something you don’t know and fear of getting it wrong.  Mary Anne Mohanraj (also among the writers, and new to Wild Cards) was writing about the same thing, relative to Fort Freak being a police story, something she knows little about beyond what she’s seen on television.  My knowledge of police dealings has a slight benefit in that one of my best friends had studied to be a cop (until health issues made him change to lawyer) and his brother is a cop, and I have other friends who work in law enforcement, so I have people to run legalities by so I won’t run too far afoul of Sjöberg’s Law of Cinematic Inaccuracy.   (“Movies get everything wrong. Hacking-based movies are laughable to hackers, military-based movies are laughable to members of the armed forces, and Indiana Jones movies are laughable to archaeologists.”)  Or, as it’s recently been termed on tvtropes.org, having a story “Dan Browned,” a subset of the trope “Did Not Do the Research.”

Of course, there are sins and sins.  Television budgetary concerns can excuse Television Geography and even “The Mountains of Illinois”, but novels and short stories?  Not so much.  I’ve read short stories set in San Francisco where people had a picnic in Candlestick Park (not realizing that it’s a baseball/football stadium) or walked from Alameda to downtown SF (somehow forgetting that not only is this quite a distance, but the bay is in the way).  And these were published too.

So, I’ll confess my failing: I’ve never visited New York.  Neither state nor city.  But I’ve written stuff set there.  Most recently for my story in Busted Flush (the scene cut for pacing and plotting, not inaccuracy), but before as well.  And now I’m about to do it again.

On the plus side, I’ve at least touched Connecticut brownstone (the Flood Mansion in San Francisco is built of the stuff, imported at ruinous expense back in the day) and being familiar with the architecture of San Francisco and other cities helps, in that what was built in one city was then reproduced in other cities of the era, often by the same architects.   (Driving around Mexico City a few years ago, I was getting deja vu, thinking at times I was in parts of San Francisco or New Orleans or even downtown San Jose.)  And with Wild Cards being an alternate timeline which diverges in 1946, there are structures which were knocked down in our Manhattan which can still exist in the world of Wild Cards.  Not tipping my hand too much, but I’m currently researching  one of those, both because it’s neat in terms of alternate history to preserve something rather than destroying everything, and because if I’m pulling from museum archives and photographs, I don’t have to worry that much about someone who actually lives somewhere looking up from the book and rolling their eyes about how I’ve got it wrong.

I’ll also be running the story by some native New Yorkers, so I can get the errors caught before publication.  But right now, it’s research time.

In her well-famed essay, to which I refer you for reference, the great loremistress lists the following thirty-one words as being the components of eighty percent of all craft names:

• Wolf     Raven Silver     Moon     Star
• Water     Snow  Sea     Tree     Wind
• Cloud     Witch     Thorn     Leaf      White
• Black     Green     Fire     Rowan Swan
• Night     Red     Mist     Hawk     Feather
• Eagle     Song     Sky     Storm     Sun
• Wood

Aside from modern witches, Wiccans and neo-pagans, this list also holds true with the majority of witches and wizards in fantasy fiction, especially popular roleplaying games, and is thus of use and interest to the writers and readers thereof.  But with all due deference to the esteemed lexicographer, her rule breaks down in one crucial area: evil overlords and wicked enchantresses.

With the exception of the always serviceable “Black” and “Night,” few evil overlords or wicked enchantresses use more than one word from the above list in their craft names, seldom two, and never three.  The same holds true for the titles of books chronicling their black deeds.  However, this is not to say that the practitioners of the black arts are any more original than their white and off-white colleagues.  They simply draw from a second, but even more limited, word list.

After perusing my vast library of blasphemous texts and eldritch tomes (mostly the aforementioned fantasy novels and gaming supplements), I, Lord Ooky Hellwrought, have found the same sixteen soul-searing words repeated again and again.  Herewith, my addenda:

• Bane     Blood     Bone    Curse    Dark
• Death    Dire    Doom    Dread     Fell
• Foul    Grim    Hell    Hex    Nether
• Shadow

These words may be combined with those from Lady Pixie Moondrip’s original list in the same manner, or, for added effect, may be added to professional titles.  Dread pirates and blood ninjas can charge more than mere ninjas and pirates.  And while no one is much impressed by a merchant or thief, the same cannot be said of death merchants and shadow thieves.  (Lord Ooky Hellwrought notes that a few professions, such as hairdressers and proctologists, are beyond help.  Aspiring evil overlords and wicked enchantresses would do best to not list these on their resumes.)

Well, while I don’t want to give any spoilers, Fox has put Dollhouse alongside The Sarah Connor Chronicles in what makes sense as a scifi block, but had promos with Summer Glau and Eliza Dushku that, if the sound were turned off, looked pretty much like 976 commercials:  “SciFi girls want to talk to you.  Just call them.  They’re waiting….”

Regardless, there was talk at the party about how Fox had asked for revision up on revision so that the first few episodes had been turned into something other than what Joss was wanting.  Something with more cop drama and explosions.  But since I can’t really discuss the truth of this without spoilers, they’ll be there after the fold:

Here’s what I saw in the pilot.  We’ve got this girl named Caroline (Dushku) who gets into some nameless but undoubtedly bad trouble such that she makes a Faustian bargain with Unpleastant Authority Figure Lady (hereinafter UAFL) such that UAFL gets to scrub her mind and use her body for five years, after which point UAFL puts her memories back and all the unpleasantness goes away for good.

After being brainscrubbed for UAFL by Blond Geek Boy, Caroline is rechristened “Echo” (with nice mythological resonance, but with the scifi explanation that all the dolls’ names are just military lingo for the alphabet) and goes to live in the Dollhouse, which looks rather like a fancy health spa except for the electroshock therapy sessions going on upstairs where they scrub people’s minds and download them onto old zip drives.  (It’s amazing the uses you can find for old technology.)

The Dollhouse requires a great deal of suspesion of disbelief.  One is that scientists with a health spa filled with childlike innocent dolls will let them just wander around anywhere they want, including into electroshock therapy sessions which Echo finds understandably upsetting and not the massage therapy she was looking for.  We also see Amy Acker playing a young Geek Girl With a Significant Facial Scar Not Covered by Make-Up.

More problematic than that, the basic premise is that ludicrously rich people are paying for the dolls to be downloaded with personalities for their own personal “Fantasy Island” weekends, whether that fantasy is sex or assasination or something in between.  Which is fine, except that in the ubiquitous world of cell phone cameras and MySpace pages, its not that credible that the dolls would remain anonymous for that long, especially with the high class circles they mingle in.

Which of course gets us to another of the players, the Handsome Cop Guy who’s out to track the Dollhouse down.  We find out that he has a hobby of being a boxer, but I’m thinking that a few less headblows and general thuggery and a bit more sneakiness and eavesdropping and he’d already have tracked it down.

Anyway, we find that Echo’s first mission is to be fantasy motorcycle party girl for some guy who pays for the perfect weekend and the perfect girl to go with it, then finishes it off with giving her a Kay Jewelers cheap gold heart pendant which looks rather sub-par for someone in the gazillion tax bracket.  Regardless, she gets her memories scrubbed, becomes Echo again, then becomes super negotiator woman to save the kidnapped daughter of some latino mob boss.

As super negotiator woman, we find that Echo has been downloaded with not only real people’s personalities, but also their disabilities.  She’s now nearsighted so she can wear sexy librarian glasses and asthmatic so she can pull out an asthma puffer and have attacks at dramatically important times.  This is explained by Blond Geek Boy, basically him saying that all the dolls are roleplaying game characters and you have to take some disads to get extra points to put in the stuff you want.  Really.  Well, those weren’t his exact words, but pretty much.  I was wanting to ask him what would happen if one of the dolls was downloaded with the memories of an amputee or someone of the opposite sex.  Or both.  “My legs!  I have legs!  I can walk again!  And I have breasts too….  WTF?”

I expect this is something we’re not supposed to think about too hard, or at all, but in any case, Echo is paired with Former Cop Guy (and token African-American cast member, so don’t confuse him with Handsome Cop Guy) who helps her along with the negotiations until things go south since it turns out that one of the memories that Echo was imprinted with came from some woman who was formerly a victim of Child-Abusing Kidnapper #3, which is why she became a super negotiatior, before commiting suicide and having her brain put on a zip drive by Blond Geek Boy (or maybe Geek Girl with a Significant Facial Scar).

It’s actually a cooler plot twist than it sounds, and the first episode ends with another cool plot twist of someone watching old sorority videos of Caroline in the middle of corpses of the people who possibly were the former owners of the sority videos.

In any case, that’s the pilot of Dollhouse, which has some intriguing characters, but more cops and former cops shoehorned in than any non-cop show really needs.  Instead of a dogged FBI boxer, why not a reporter?  It certainly worked for The Hulk, and would be easily modernized to a blogger.  And I’m really not certain why The Dollhouse is employing a former cop either, except in that I strongly suspect some Fox exec got it into their head that they need to put cops in everything, so Joss compromised with a former cop.

Scuttlebutt has it that of the next two episodes, one will be better, one will be worse, then the show should hit some sort of stride.  Which I dearly hope for, since I’ve enjoyed Joss’s previous shows.  This?  Well, there was an awful lot crammed in.  But we’ll see where it goes.

First off, let me make one thing clear: Departure from the source material is fine.   The Wizard of Oz dumped the scene in the Dainty China Country from the movie adaptation because it was boring, extraneous, and painfully lame.  Glomming the Good Witch of the North and Glinda the Sorceress of the South together makes sense from a dramatic perspective, though making her a bubbly airhead was a bit much (although the MGM version does have her fans).  Having the Wicked Witch of the West be responsible for the poppies is fine for purposes of drama, and having them be foiled by snow as opposed to field mice is likewise fine for purposes of staging.  Mary Norton’s The Magic Bedknob and Bonfires and Broomsticks do not contain Nazis, musical numbers, a young Miss Price, or magical football matches with talking animals–though all of these things are very fun in Bedknobs and Broomsticks, a movie I adored as a child and had to thank for introducing me to the equally good (if significantly different) book.  And Alfonso Cuaron’s version of A Little Princess took numerous liberties with the original novel, including but not limited to moving the setting from London to New York, making Becky black instead of Cockney, and most significantly, having Sarah’s dad not be dead of bad investments in India but instead poisoned by mustard gas and MIA in WWI.

The difference here is that The Wizard of Oz, Bedknobs and Broomsticks and Cuaron’s A Little Princess are all great movies.   The reason The Seeker isn’t is not because elements were changed, but because elements were changed for the wrong reasons and the wrong way.

The biggest, and wrongest, change was making Will Stanton, and his entire immediate family, American.  This was inane.  The filmmakers had some waffle about how this was done to emphasize Will as being an outsider and yadayadayada and various nonsense to cover up the fact that some executive thinks American theatre-going children only want to see films about American kids.

This is rubbish.  It’s not that it can’t be done–the boy in Roald Dahl’s The Witches is made American rather than British, and Mr. Darling is made an American computer game designer rather than a British economist for the live-action 101 Dalmations–but in this case it doesn’t work for the simple fact that, unlike the two counterexamples, it cuts the heart of the character.  Will Stanton is not an American child discovering the magical and mystical Britain (or at least the ability to blow up cars with his mind) but a British child with a stable and supportive family discovering magic and danger waiting for him right there in his home village.

Making Will fourteen rather than eleven?  Another problem, and a significant one.  Apart from all “Who buys popcorn?” charts nonsense, and concerns with dealing with child actors, eleven is an age for exploration and independence without having to really bother with hormones or even the societal pressure that one needs to deal with hormones.  The “love interest” plot pasted into The Seeker?  Completely extraneous and stupid.  Making Miss Price younger and prettier in Bedknobs and Broomsticks is fine because the heart of the character is the same: She’s an independent woman living on her own and studying witchcraft who suddenly has her secret discovered by a trio of children.  Whether she’s late thirties or late fifties is immaterial, and her romance with Mr. Brown–either version–is a matter of slowly growing affection, not something she’s actively looking for.

This goes double for all the manufactured family drama that wasn’t present in Susan Cooper’s original book.  Your protagonist has enough trouble dealing with the Dark without also having to deal with his eldest brother angsting about dropping out of college.

Changing the time period of the story from the late 60s to the current day is not an issue except in the way that it’s dealt with.  There is a problem with a movie when one of the more interesting and magical scenes takes place in a mall.  But whatever you do, don’t make a big fuss over giving your character a digital watch.  Digital watches weren’t even cool in the eighties, let alone the present day.  And for god’s sake don’t have him travel back in time and trade it to a Viking.

And changing “The Sign of Fire” into “The Power of the Human Soul”?  One supposes the script writer was not familiar with “What sort of lame power is Heart anyway?”

The sad thing is, there would be any number of ways to kick up the action of the book to make it more dramatic onscreen without having your protagonist blow up cars (even more troubling given that the Sign of Fire was edited out, despite the fact that giving actual powers to the Signs wouldn’t have damaged the original storyline and would have indeed made it more dramatic).

Of course there are any number of sad things about The Seeker, the main one being that it will now be a number of years before anyone can get together enough money to do a proper adaptation.

It was easy (particularly when I was younger) to see this as a rather childish wish; with the wisdom of age, give or take, I think that life is hard enough and if the fantasy of living in a magical then-and-there and being beautiful and clever and well dressed helps a reader get through the day, I’m glad to have provided that service.  For me, however, part of what I love about writing about the past, or the future, or fantastic societies, is the chance to play with the fallout from that most human of pastimes: organizing ourselves into castes.  

Anyone who has ever watched kids at a playground with something other than a rosy eye knows: from an early age social strata play a huge part in our social functioning.  Why?  Maybe it’s easier to handle the needs and ideas of a big group of people if you can simply say “they’re not as cool as we are, so we don’t have to listen to them.”  Maybe, like Border Collies, we just can’t keep from herding each other into neat categories.  I don’t know why this is a part of human behavior; but I’m not horrified just because a fantasist creates a world with dukes or grand high viziers at one end and peasants on the other.  Nor am I horrified when a character on the low end of the totem pole doesn’t rebel against their place in the universe.  People vary infinitely: I’m pretty sure that for every feisty peasant who dreamed of overthrowing the dominant paradigm and becoming a land-owner, there were others who either had too little imagination, too little leisure, or too much imagination to think of such things. 

I do think, however, that one of the jobs that fantasy can and should do is to let us play with what power does to people on either side of the equation.  And I think one of the ways in which fantasy can fail is when the writer doesn’t take his/her/its own preconceptions into account.  Some years ago I had to do a comic-book adaptation of the Baroness Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel.  The book is jaw-droppingly racist, anti-semitic, and jingoistic.  There are good peasants– English, of course–and they are respectful, hard-working, and know their place.  There are bad, smelly, bloodthirsty peasants–they’re French.  All aristocrats are good, though some are weak and fussy.  The middle class (of which I think we can count Chauvelin a member) is very sketchy.  And the last third of the book sees the Pimpernel disguised as an elderly Orthodox Jew, riding over the countryside next to Chauvelin, and even the villain keeps ruminating on how stinky and repellent Jews are. I have no problem with Orczy’s depiction of anti-semitism, which was certainly a fact of life in the 18th century; what gave me collywobbles was her lip-smacking certainty that this was not only the way of the world, but entirely right.  Even for the adventure-romances of her period (Prisoner of Zenda, The Four Feathers, Beau Geste, and their ilk) Orczy was over the top.  Granted, she wasn’t writing a hard-hitting tale of class warfare, she was writing a rousing adventure fantasy.  It just drips with class and race prejudice is all.

On the other hand, assuming that all peasants are virtuous and all aristos are evil is just another fallacy, and as just as uninteresting.  Feudal lords had responsibilities to their dependents as much as the dependents owed their lords duty and income.  Some took these responsibilities very seriously; some not so much.  And most of them didn’t look much farther than the status quo, or question why they got to sleep in a keep and have meat for dinner and the guy who plowed the fields didn’t.  God set things up that way, right?  And I hate hate hate fantasies and historicals where the author sets up a status quo and then has the heroine/hero fight against it for no discernible reason other than because it’s what we, 21st century readers, would do.  Where does that will to rebel come from?  What does the hero/heroine want out of the rebellion?  To be king, or simply to have a full belly for once?

Probably my favorite example of how to write an individual at odds with her society is Jane Eyre.  Jane is sometimes characterized as a feminist, a term which would doubtless have fried poor Charlotte Brontë’s brains to charcoal.  Jane doesn’t want to do the things men do; she doesn’t really expect that her status can change (and when change threatens–when Rochester wants to shower her with jewelry and fancy clothes, she’s dismayed); she doesn’t even want to be chiefest among her sex.  What she wants is almost more revolutionary: Jane Eyre wants to be taken seriously as a person with feelings, ideas, and something to contribute, an idea which her society is almost entirely unable to compass.  Only a few people she encounters in the book are able to fathom that, and I think one reason she loves Rochester is that he gets it, and her, which makes their respective status unimportant.  (On the other hand, as Elizabeth Bennet notes about Mr. Darcy, “He is a gentleman, I am a gentleman’s daughter.”  Jane may be poor, plain, and insignificant, but she’s not a goose-girl or laundry maid.)

I love that in the Lord of the Rings* movies Samwise Gamgee never forgets that Frodo is Mr. Frodo and he is plain Sam.  That strikes me, not as regressive, but as utterly true to the time and place (likely to Tolkien’s prejudices too).  Of course, in five hundred years maybe the hobbits will have progressed to greater social equality (without elves in the picture to look down on mere mortals, that might be easier).  

What it comes down to is, if you’re building another time-and-place, class should be a part of it.  Just don’t forget to examine what your assumptions and aspirations are and what class means to you as a writer while you’re building your world.

*Confession: I have never been able to get through Tolkien’s Rings books, although I can hear them read with great enjoyment.  Someday, someday.

The question still remains, however: What is it about monarchy that seems to be so attractive to fantasy authors? Or conversely, what is it about fantasy that seems to find monarchy so attractive?

Fantasy is the oldest kind of story, rooted directly in myth, the tales of gods and other wondrous beings who did wondrous deeds at the beginning of time. Moreover, fantasy continually revisits its roots, seeking to revive and capture that primal wonder.

It is for this reason that there is always a backwards-looking strain in fantasy fiction, usually not because of any reactionary political leanings of the authors, but because this branch of fantasy seeks the divine, the numinous, the wonder of those times when myth was alive.

There is a limit to how far back we can go. Our species has lived on Earth for about a hundred thousand years, but the historical record covers only the most recent five percent of that time, and that incompletely. We know from the finds of archaeology that our distant ancestors had religious beliefs, that they entertained hope of an afterlife, that they probably had invented gods and worshiped them. But we can only conjecture about the actual content of their myths, the stories the people told about their gods. This is the realm of the imagination, the realm of fantasy.

We do know that myths are mutable, that by the time they were written down in the form with which we are familiar, they had been greatly altered from earlier versions, in response to various changes among the circumstances of the people telling the stories, including political changes. We know that sometime around ten thousand years ago, the structures of human life in much of the world changed drastically and irrevocably with the development of agriculture, rapid increase in population, and the resulting growth of population centers: the phenomenon we call “civilization.” Cities. States. Kingdoms.

Throughout most of known human history, up until the last hundred years or so, the default form of the state has been the kingdom. Human history, as generations of schoolchildren have complained, is the coming and going of kings. If we look into the past for historical models for our stories, what we find are kingdoms and kings, with a few aberrant states here and there departing from the near-universal model, just to make things more interesting.

And where there are kings, they claim to be gods. This phenomenon, while not universal, has occurred worldwide, as kings attempt to enhance their prestige and elevate themselves above the common humanity that they rule. If kings are gods, their rule must be unquestionable. If kings are gods, it would be sacrilege to attempt to depose them. If kings are gods, the pomp with which they are surrounded is only natural. If one king is a god, he must certainly occupy a higher position than some other neighboring king who is not divine, and will probably conquer his kingdom.

The emperors of Japan were descended from the sun goddess Amaterasu. Kings of the Mayans were descended from the Hero Twins, and they served as their living representatives on Earth. Gilgamesh, king of Uruk and son of the goddess Ninsun, may not have started as a god, but he ended up as one. The Akkadian kings declared themselves gods while they were alive and ruling.

If kings were not entirely divine, they often claimed divine blood, descent from some god, which proved their right to the kingship. The tale of Theseus is a model: a bastard son of the god Poseidon, his exploits on his journey to Athens reveal his divine origin and, paradoxically, reveal him as the rightful heir to the kingdom of Athens. This story, essentially unchanged, has been told and retold to legitimatize a host of princes.

After Christianity took over Europe, the tradition of god-descended kings became politically incorrect, but the aura of divinity still clung to the institution of kingship. It is likely that many tales of Norse and Celtic gods were reverse-engineered to change the old gods to legendary or historical human kings, naming them as founders of dynasties such as the Norse Ynglings, descended from the god Freyr; King Arthur of legend may have originally been such a god.

As late as the eighteenth century, kings were still believed to have special quasi-divine powers, such as the ability to cure disease. Samuel Johnson was taken as a child to be touched by Queen Anne to cure scrofula, also known as The King’s Evil, as it was considered particularly susceptible to the monarch’s touch.

But the divinity of kings has by now faded almost everywhere, and the few remaining kings themselves are more often regarded as useless and expensive parasites, rather than wielding the power of gods. But the old stories still retain their power to stir the imagination. I suspect that as long as fantasy continues to be published, we will still see tales of kings, the sons of gods. Not for any yearning to be the subjects of a monarchy, but for the wonder of the story, the tales of gods who walked among humanity, and of kings who were divine.

Carol

You can compare the 1973 edition’s Table of Contents 

here with the Table of Contents for this new 2007 edition here.  A thoughtful consideration of SF sparked by this new edition of Aldis’s Omnibus appears in the current Times Literary Supplement. 

You may not agree with every point Dinah Birch, the writer, makes, but its interesting to read.

[ Loneliness shadows science fiction, and is made more acute by its customary settings amid the emptiness of space, with solitary voyagers or beleaguered bands of adventurers encountering the hostilities of planets that deny the consolations of familiarity. The opening images of Walter M. Miller’s brilliant “I Made You” (1954) are typical:

"It sat on the crag by night. Gaunt, frigid, wounded, it sat under the black sky and listened to the land with its feet, while only its dishlike ear moved in slow patterns that searched the surface of the land and the sky The land was silent, airless. Nothing moved, except the feeble thing that scratched in the cave."

The “feeble thing” turns out to be a man, about to be destroyed by the suffering robot that he has created. The story is recognizably a reflection of Frankenstein. It serves, like Frankenstein, to caution against the dangers of scientific progress pursued with no thought of moral consequences. This bleakly admonitory tone repels many readers. It is the business of science fiction to alarm, in the sense of providing the excitement of thrilling dangers, and of scaring readers with the prospect of a future in which human values are threatened. Ruthless invasions, apocalyptic plagues, wars and famines, dying stars, mechanized intelligences and predatory civilizations, have been its favourite devices. Fredric Brown’s “Answer” (1964), a piercingly brief story, points to the hazards of the internet, years before it was invented. Scientists link every computer on earth in order to ask a single question – “Is there a God?”. The answer is immediate: “Yes, NOW there is a God”. The warnings of science fiction are endlessly inventive, often witty, and sometimes salutary, but they do not make for comforting reading. ]

When I was a tad, far back in the days when there was little if any SF and even less F on television and in the movies and in the bookstores, these anthologies and omnibuses were among my most prized discoveries for reading, and re-reading, and re-reading even more times than that.  I didn’t realize it, but these kinds of collections were teaching me what was good about SF, and how it worked, through an infinite variety of treatments and approaches, only limited by the number of stories and writers that could be included.

Love, C.