Point of View - Third Omniscient

Kate Elliott February 3rd, 2008

Point of view is a subject we as writers discuss frequently, for obvious reasons.

A reader recently asked me in email if there are any online discussions of the use of third omniscient in fantasy (and sf) as opposed to third limited; discussions of the latter are easy to find, the former not so much. I said that I thought that third omniscient isn’t in fashion these days, although there are examples of it in print.

So I’d like to open up a discussion here.

What are the peculiar problems inherent in third omniscient?

What books of old or now current have used this pov?

If you’ve used it, please discuss the why and how, if you feel so inclined.

From Penguin: A SCIENCE FICTION OMNIBUS ed. by Brian Aldiss

Constance Ash February 3rd, 2008

Penguin paperbacks have long provided readers with authoratative editions of classic literature from all nations and genres, edited by experts in the field.  Peguin regularly updates its classics, with new translations, new citations, new editors and different covers.  Thus Penguin’s Science Fiction Omnibus, published in Britain in November 2007, updates the Aldis edited SF Omnibus of 1973.

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.

Put Poetry in Your Blog Day

Constance Ash February 2nd, 2008

Two Visions of Vampires by two enduringly popular poets:


“Oil and Blood“
By William Butler Yeats

In tombs of gold and lapis lazuli
Bodies of holy men and women exude
Miraculous oil, odour of violet.

But under heavy loads of trampled clay
Lie bodies of the vampires full of blood;
Their shrouds are bloody and their lips are wet.

. . . y, otra . . .  from Byron’s The Giaour  . . . .

A turban carved in coarsest stone,
A pillar with rank weeds o’ergrown,
Whereon can now be scarcely read
The Koran verse that mourns the dead,
Point out the spot where Hassan fell
A victim in that lonely dell.
There sleeps as true an Osmanlie
As e’er at Mecca bent the knee;
As ever scorn’d forbidden wine,
Or pray’d with face towards the shrine,
In orisons resumed anew
At solemn sound of “Alla Hu!”
Yet died he by a stranger’s hand,
And stranger in his native land;
Yet died he as in arms he stood,
And unavenged, at least in blood.
But him the maids of Paradise
Impatient to their halls invite,
And the dark Heaven of Houris’ eyes
On him shall glance for ever bright;
They come—their kerchiefs green they wave,
And welcome with a kiss the brave!
Who falls in battle ‘gainst a Giaour
Is worthiest an immortal bower.

But thou, false Infidel! shall writhe
Beneath avenging Monkir’s scythe;
And from its torments ’scape alone
To wander round lost Eblis’ throne;
And fire unquench’d, unquenchable,
Around, within, thy heart shall dwell;
Nor ear can hear nor tongue can tell
The tortures of that inward hell!
But first, on earth as Vampire sent,
Thy corse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corse:
Thy victims ere they yet expire
Shall know the demon for their sire,
As cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem.
But one that for thy crime must fall,
The youngest, most beloved of all,
Shall bless thee with a father’s name—
That word shall wrap thy heart in flame!
Yet must thou end thy task, and mark
Her cheek’s last tinge, her eye’s last spark,
And the last glassy glance must view
Which freezes o’er its lifeless blue;
Then with unhallow’d hand shalt tear
The tresses of her yellow hair,
Of which in life a lock when shorn
Affection’s fondest pledge was worn,
But now is borne away by thee,
Memorial of thine agony!
Wet with thine own best blood shall drip
Thy gnashing tooth and haggard lip;
Then stalking to thy sullen grave,
Go—and with Gouls and Afrits rave;
Till these in horror shrink away
From Spectre more accursed than they!

   

Wild Cards: American Hero & other interactive web fiction

Kevin Andrew Murphy February 2nd, 2008

Tor’s new Wild Cards website has been spiffed up and updated, with information on the mass signing in Albuquerque today with most of the Inside Straight authors. Moreover, Tor has just launched the American Hero website, the fully in-character blog and promotional website for American Hero, the superhero reality television show taking place in the Wild Cards universe and a central part of the plot of Inside Straight.

There are twenty eight characters on the show and we’ve got illustrations for all of them from the amazing Mike Miller. More, all of the authors have been writing confessionals from the standpoints of their characters. Up now for Week 1 are Joe Twitch (created and written by Walton Simons), Spasm (created and written by Daniel Abraham), Drummer Boy (created and written by S.L. Farrell), and Rosa Loteria (created and written by yours truly).

Rosa Loteria portraitGo over and take a look. Ask the characters questions. Of course, the contestants are all busy with challenges on the show, but who knows, some of them might answer. (Mine are Rosa Loteria and The Maharajah.)

This is also kind of exciting as an author since it’s a new publishing venue. I’ve seen website expansions to the content from movies, most notably the rather amazing Donnie Darko site which had some neat fiction which expanded the movie, and likewise the (now long defunct) website for the Point Pleasant tv show. But this is the first time I’ve seen extra web fiction content being done for a series of novels and anthologies, especially author created and owned.

Anyway, please take a look and see what you think, and also, let’s talk about the web as a venue for new fiction in general.

How to Write a Novel (Part 2)

David Louis Edelman January 21st, 2008

So you decided to write a novel, you committed yourself to the task, and you agonized your way through your first draft — as described in How to Write a Novel (Part 1). Now one of two things will happen:

John Barth writing 1) You’ll print that sucker out and add a title page. You’ll type up a page dedicating the book to your sister Chloë in Venice, whose steadfast support and witty observations helped you get through the tough parts, and who served as the inspiration for the character of Empress Fögelschmëer (the Younger). You’ll add a cover letter, mail the whole package off to Random House, and watch the royalty checks flow in. Or,

2) You’ll look at what you’ve written and realize it ain’t publishable.

Most writers — even the successful ones — fall into that second camp. And it’s nothing to be ashamed of. Months or even years will have passed since you started, and the world’s not the same place. You’re not the same person. So it’s only natural that the story has wandered onto unforeseen paths. It’s only natural you look back at those early chapters and shake your head and think, How naive that guy was who wrote this stuff.

Don’t despair. Here’s a path (my path) of getting from first draft to final draft. As before, keep in mind that your mileage may vary.

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Don’t Panic

Carol Berg January 19th, 2008

So funny that David should come up with his great How to Write a Novel post just now. Exactly twelve days after launching Breath and Bone — the culmination of the most intense writing project of my life, begun with a paragraph back in May 2004 — I agree with my publisher on a new 3-book epic fantasy series, tentatively titled The Sabrian Veil. Cheers and happiness all around…and then panic sets in…

I look back at the Lighthouse books - and my other two series - and see how complex they are, and I am absolutely daunted at beginning again. It is no wonder that so many authors find themselves going back again and again to the worlds they’ve created.

But then I start twiddling with my notes, and before I know it, I’ve started and ended a war in the distant past, and filled out a sketch of the nature of magic in Sabria - because the conflict in this series derives, in part, from the nature of magic, the differences between popular belief, manipulated perception, and truth. And Real Soon Now, I’ll commit by writing the first chapter. I had to know enough of the world and characters to write the book proposal - which was very hard for an anti-outliner like me. But I’ll flesh it out only enough to write the first chapter. I write sequentially and spirally - ie. I start at the beginning and write through to the end. Each day I begin writing by revising what came before. No real drafts at all. But that’s what has worked before, and I’ve got to have that jump off the cliff faith that it will happen again.

If anyone is interested, I’ve decided to record the daily bits of this particular development cycle on my personal blog, Text Crumbs. Join me there, if you’re interested in the sordid details.

Cheers to all. Don’t Panic.
Carol

How to Write a Novel (Part 1)

David Louis Edelman January 15th, 2008

One of the Ten Commandments of Author Blogging is “thou must write a post explaining how thou writest thine novels.” And so, in an effort to save my immortal writerly soul from scribbler’s purgatory, I’m going to explain my process in easy numbered steps that anyone can follow.

Since I’ve only written two novels to date — Infoquake and MultiReal — and am now in the midst of a third, I can’t say that this is always going to be my process. All I can say is that it’s worked for me twice now, and it seems to be doing just dandy the third time around.

More importantly, I can’t say whether this process will work for you. No two writers write the same way, and sometimes what works for one person will only trip up the next person. Life’s like that. You’ll need to adapt to your own unique circumstances as you see fit.

Here goes. How to write a novel:

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Hacked

David Louis Edelman January 14th, 2008

Ack. We been hacked. I’m working to upgrade our WordPress installation and fix the problem, but in the meantime be patient. (And if you need something to read in the meantime, we’ve got lots of published authors here…)

Update 1:25 PM: Well, that was quick. We’re all upgraded to the latest WordPress, and the hacked code is gone. For the irretrievably curious, we got hit with this. Everything seems to be back to normal, but if you do see something amiss, please email me.

Dance The Knife Cutting Through Worlds

Constance Ash January 14th, 2008

Pullman’s His Subtle Knife

Choreographed by Merce Cunningham;

Danced by the Cunningham Company

Alternate Worlds Moving on Two Stages, Performing for One Audience

I’ve been attending the revelatory Merce Cunningham ‘events’ all my adult life — on occasion the spouse has been honored as a composer for an edition of these events, so famous, for so long, in the world of art and dance. These were informal gatherings of audience and company in the Cunningham studio, devised for choreographer, dancers, composer and audience to exchange energies via the matrix of Cunningham at play, with his constant playmates, time and space.

This weekend the Cunningham Company held an ‘event’ at the glorious Dia Art Foundation - museum, which is located outside of Beacon, NY. I can personally testify that the land upon which the beautiful building is sited, provides a canvas of seasonal light and shadow display that is breathtaking, no matter the weather or the time of year. This weekend’s event at Dia included choreography inspired by Pullman’s The Subtle Knife. The NY Times dance critic describes the event thus:

[ To watch his company on Saturday afternoon in the first of two Cunningham Events last weekend at Dia:Beacon was to see a poetically compelling exposition of parallel-universe theory. Before at Dia:Beacon, Mr. Cunningham has staged events on two or more stages at the same time. In 2004, working on three stages at the Tate Modern in London, he employed a barrier that prevented audiences from seeing all three at once unless they looked up to the lofty mirrored ceiling in Turbine Hall (where the full action was visible, though very distant).

On Saturday at Dia:Beacon he placed his two stages adjacent but on either side of a square doorway. Wherever you were sitting, you could see only part, never all, of the stage on the opposite side. That door, leading from one world to a parallel stage, evoked the controlling image of The Subtle Knife, the second novel of Philip Pullman's trilogy His Dark Materials. In it the young hero can cut his way "slicing a square aperture in the air" from this Oxford into different worlds, at least one of which contains an alternative Oxford.

As the event began, the stage farthest from me looked breathtakingly like a mirror of the one closer to me. One group of dancers was moving in slow, controlled adagio, stepping, arching and bending with precision, while another, dressed identically, was doing the same but facing the other way.

Then, more than a minute into the dance, the denizens of the through-the-looking-glass world started to move in other steps and in a different tempo, whereupon the dichotomy between these two now dissimilar stages became both frustrating and entrancing. Here the dancers were balancing, fixed, waiting; there they were leaping fast across the space, caught up in some rush of which we could see only a fraction. And, like characters in the Pullman novels, dancers moved from one world, or stage, to another and back again. ]

Watching a Cunningham choreography, whether from early in his career (he’s now 91), or one just recently created, one feels she has left this world and re-entered another that has been lost, a world in which the sacred exists, as both sublime and far beyond any rigid and short-sighted religion, to a world that has existed long before this one, and which will survive hard and passionate once we have departed. It’s a privilege that everyone should be entitled to experience.

So it’s natural that this man would be drawn to a book by a YA author that speaks to slicing open gates into parallel worlds.

Love, C.

Recommended Books Read in 2007

Constance Ash December 26th, 2007

This list came about because Vaquero asked the members of our e-mail list to send us the titles of books they most liked reading in 2007. This wasn’t a round-up of 2007’s best published books, but rather, whatever the members had read and thought worth recommending to others. Here’s my list, broken into fiction and non-fiction. That all the titles are linked to amazon isn’t because I’m enrolled in their kickback program (I’m not.) Don’t care if you buy from amazon or anyone or at all. But their database is there, and it is convenient for all of us to use.

Fiction

Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra is a huge novel — nearly 900 pp., packed with characters, and flashbacks. It never drags, is always interesting; you are always wanting to know what comes next. It’s a policier-detective-mystery-gangster novel, written by an Indian author, all characters Indian, all locations foregrounded in India. It is also, appropriately, considering India’s cultural and political history as the jewel in the British Empire’s crown, a conscious inheritor of the grand English Victorian 3-decker novel, notably, George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

There’s a glossary of names and vocabulary that is as long as a slim modernist novel itself, both necessary and worthwhile for the reader, as well as interesting in itself. As another signal of how good this book is, you wish the author had made the glossary longer, because, as with a Tolstoy novel, after some chapters when you’ve become familiar enough with the characters and the milieu, and you no longer need the glossary, whole new sets of questions are set off in the reader’s mind that call for yet more glossary entries.

This novel is the one of all those I’ve read in the last 5 years perhaps, that I’ve enjoyed the most thoroughly, on the most number of levels, particularly because it throws open windows and doors into unfamiliar worlds, which is what fiction can do better than anything else, particularly if taken in tandem with the food and what makes the people, for whom those worlds are common reality, laugh. There is a lot about food in Sacred Games, and a lot of laughing.

With the exception of the Díaz and Chandra titles, these novels all are what the publishing industry categorizes as genre — sf/f, mysteries, historical. These are shelved by bookstores, and libraries too, in sections separate from each other, as well as safely segregated from the shelves labeled “literature and fiction.” These novels may not appeal, then, to those without a taste for the genres; on the other hand, since 9/11 there are fewer novels published outside of genre that this reader can be bothered with; notably, there’s no stomaching any in the cascade of novels that is currently being published about 9/11, in the competition among our ‘literary novelists’ to own the catastrophe that signaled the end of the world as we knew it.

So, it’s worth noting that the Junot Díaz novel informs us of the Dominican Republic’s cruel history via constant referencing sf/f genre and pop culture, and that Sacred Games was lauded by those who review ’serious’ fiction and literature, because Chandra, like Díaz, has a prior reputation as a ‘literary’ author with ‘critical acclaim.’

Another point of interest is that hardly anyone sent in fiction titles. However, two others did include The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, as well as Vaquero and myself, and another list member recommended Octavia Butler’s Fledgling. Perhaps genre fiction is more highly regarded, and of greater interest to the general reading public than some might believe.
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