It's cool how Game of Thrones is anti-chivalry propaganda, and people like talking about that, but T.H. White's The Once and Future King was anti-chivalry propaganda a million years ago, so I don't think that's the coolest part of GoT.
The coolest part of Game of Thrones is that Martin thinks through the consequences of living in a society without a rule of law. Fantasy writers screw that up all the time. They either give their setting a robust rule of law (a legitimate choice, but one that often sticks out weirdly from the rest of the setting), or they don't follow through on the whole "these people are barbarians" thing.
By "rule of law" I mean the understanding most of us modern people have that laws come from, well, laws (fixed rules written down somewhere) rather than directly from our rulers. We know that ultimately law comes from the threat of force, but we place buffers and cushions between our leaders and the application of their power, because the alternative is tyranny or anarchy. (You can usually spot political lunatics because they try to strip away the barriers of intermediation: they try to give everyone guns and banish fiat currency, for example. They want to get rid of the barriers and let power flow directly, and most people instinctively recoil from that.)
Westeros is a setting without as many layers of intermediation as our own world, and the buffers between the people who wield raw power and the people who suffer it are vanishing one by one. Westeros hasn't had the rule of law since Joffrey offed Ned Stark. Or since Jaime Lannister killed the Mad King. Or since Robert Baratheon fought a rebellion against the Targaryens. Or since Aegon the Conqueror showed up and decided that since he had dragons, he deserved a kingdom...
...Okay, Westeros has basically never recognized "law" as most people today understand the concept. It's all people wielding power directly. That's why the rift between the Starks and the Karstarks was so disastrous to Robb's hopes of winning the Iron Throne, and while it's easy to dismiss the Northerners as a bunch of pseudo-Scottish barbaric clansmen, the South is no better: North or South, power is just a bunch of rich families.
George RR Martin, unlike most fantasy authors, actually follows through on the promise of his setting, like a hard science-fiction author. He doesn't even use magic as the primary source of disintermediation. Obviously people who wield magic make it hard to have a rule of law (what do zoning ordinances matter to someone who can conjure castles and demons from thin air?), but Martin uses that trick sparingly. Instead he just shows the consequences of his setting's assumptions, without chickening out. Martin doesn't have a suspiciously modern senate moderating the excesses of kings; he doesn't have a bunch of barbarians re-create the United Federation of Planets; he doesn't even give you the solace of a modern-thinking viewpoint character looking smugly down on the savages (Tyrion may be ethical, but his ethics are purely interpersonal; he's no Seneca). People credit Martin's unflinching look at the cruelty of Westeros as his story's most interesting feature, but Martin's greatest strength is his meticulous exploration of a world with one key difference: not the magic, not the seasons, but the lack of law.
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Showing posts with label literature. Show all posts
Tuesday, May 13, 2014
Wednesday, May 8, 2013
D&D Novels: They Are Bad
Breaking news, right?
In high school I probably read a combined total of around a hundred million words of D&D-inspired fiction. That sort of thing should prevent me from ever becoming a real writer, but I think I learned something from the experience.
D&D novels, like most media tie-ins, are bad. Among other reasons, they're bad because they cannot use one of the most important tools in the speculative fiction writer's arsenal: the ability to tie the plot to the world's setting.
The best fantasy (like the best science fiction, which is one of the many sub-genres of fantasy that is fun because it's easier to believe it could be real) derives its plots from the rules of its world. The Lord of the Rings loses its power if you remove its underlying metaphysical and moral assumptions about the nature of loss, power, and the need to preserve the past. If The Lord of the Rings isn't conservative (in almost every sense of the word), it's nothing, and since the first wave of Tolkien clones hit in the 70s, critics have lamented the inability of Tolkien's imitators to understand that you can't separate Tolkien's plot from his own personal views.
D&D fiction goes further than that, creating an enforced bubble of artificial reality (the D&D rules) in which the plot must take place, but the D&D rules don't make for good metaphysics, for obvious reasons: a deep, metaphysically robust game system makes for a bad universal fantasy system. So D&D writers, who are not all terrible, substitute familiarity for the metaphysics-as-plot link that fantasy needs. Instead of building a story around a magic system (think Elantris; in fact, go ahead and think of almost any good speculative fiction), the writers parade before us one familiar item after another--here is a magic missile spell; here is a paladin; here is a beholder.
I'm writing this because, like with Lieutenant Worf, it's a lesson I learned too well, and I'm increasingly aware that my comic tips in the opposite direction: without a proper understanding of the metaphysics of The Water Phoenix King setting, the plot is incomprehensible from top to bottom. Tolkien, at least, had evil ghost-wizards trying to take over the world; by contrast, WPK's antagonists don't necessarily even look like antagonists until you understand the underlying rules of reality that motivate them.
It's interesting to see how many elements of my own writing--including things that I'm increasingly convinced aren't very good--are reactions, and overcompensations, to the terrible rubbish-entertainment I consumed as a kid.
In high school I probably read a combined total of around a hundred million words of D&D-inspired fiction. That sort of thing should prevent me from ever becoming a real writer, but I think I learned something from the experience.
D&D novels, like most media tie-ins, are bad. Among other reasons, they're bad because they cannot use one of the most important tools in the speculative fiction writer's arsenal: the ability to tie the plot to the world's setting.
The best fantasy (like the best science fiction, which is one of the many sub-genres of fantasy that is fun because it's easier to believe it could be real) derives its plots from the rules of its world. The Lord of the Rings loses its power if you remove its underlying metaphysical and moral assumptions about the nature of loss, power, and the need to preserve the past. If The Lord of the Rings isn't conservative (in almost every sense of the word), it's nothing, and since the first wave of Tolkien clones hit in the 70s, critics have lamented the inability of Tolkien's imitators to understand that you can't separate Tolkien's plot from his own personal views.
D&D fiction goes further than that, creating an enforced bubble of artificial reality (the D&D rules) in which the plot must take place, but the D&D rules don't make for good metaphysics, for obvious reasons: a deep, metaphysically robust game system makes for a bad universal fantasy system. So D&D writers, who are not all terrible, substitute familiarity for the metaphysics-as-plot link that fantasy needs. Instead of building a story around a magic system (think Elantris; in fact, go ahead and think of almost any good speculative fiction), the writers parade before us one familiar item after another--here is a magic missile spell; here is a paladin; here is a beholder.
I'm writing this because, like with Lieutenant Worf, it's a lesson I learned too well, and I'm increasingly aware that my comic tips in the opposite direction: without a proper understanding of the metaphysics of The Water Phoenix King setting, the plot is incomprehensible from top to bottom. Tolkien, at least, had evil ghost-wizards trying to take over the world; by contrast, WPK's antagonists don't necessarily even look like antagonists until you understand the underlying rules of reality that motivate them.
It's interesting to see how many elements of my own writing--including things that I'm increasingly convinced aren't very good--are reactions, and overcompensations, to the terrible rubbish-entertainment I consumed as a kid.
Saturday, May 4, 2013
Odd Dreams
I'm back for more. A couple years ago I basically concluded my participation in tabletop gaming because I just couldn't get a decent group together, but right now I'm writing a novel and I need a release valve for my non-novel ideas.
Today's topic: weird dreams I had. I'm writing them down so they'll stick--and stay useful as idea-fodder, not because I expect you poor people to care.
The first was (or resembled) a Truman Capote novel, a sort of late-period 20th century meditation on declining male sexuality seen through the lens of either anthropological fiction or magical realism--I'm not sure which. In it, Capote (or "the narrator", since it was a Capote novel only by implication) finds himself in Tibet, or a place like Tibet. At first believing he is the only white man, he instead finds himself in the shadow of a fellow-researcher of whom the narrator has always been jealous, who attracts more attention and respect from the people there, especially from the young women. The narrator finds himself in a Watson-like role, recording the exploits of his friend while growing increasingly frustrated with both his friend and himself. Despite its meager plot, the novel spoke powerfully to the frustrations of people who, thinking they had escaped themselves, experienced something that once again made them who they always were. The novel ends abruptly with the two in burial shrouds, though it is implied that the narrator faked his own death--the friend did not.
The second is a trashy genre or perhaps book-list called "Havaoc," a 70s spy/martial arts thriller in the tradition of Clive Cussler, full of books with alluring covers that feature too many men in turtleneck-suits. The stories are full of beautiful women, barely coherent plots, and secret temples, with an emphasis on popular interpretations of martial arts techniques and a lot of technical information that is as detailed as it is nonsensical.
These two dreams amuse me not because they're particularly interesting, but because I can see my usual writing process in them, working even while I'm unconscious. Both are no more than combinations of things I've seen, tossed together as a bunch of interesting images, themes, and moods, with little in the way of a coherent plot-structure. I'm no good at plots. (Tabletop gaming will do that to you--plots aren't my job, after all.) The "Capote" novel is a combination of a handful of things I recently experienced, from In Cold Blood to Steven King discussing the origin of Carrie's themes to a David Foster Wallace article on the decaying trajectory of 20th century "literary" fiction to the new Great Gatsby movie (that "Watson-like" role is probably more "Carraway-like") to an article I read on sky burial to the hardcover copy of the book Alive, which I grew up staring at as a little kid and which, returning to my mother's house the other day, I saw in the same spot it always has occupied. By contrast, I think the "Havaoc" books (boy were they bad!) is my brain screaming at me to write a novel that normal people would want to read, prompted by Richard Kadrey tweeting that he found his books at an airport kiosk--a great triumph for the legitimacy of an old cyberpunk!
Today's topic: weird dreams I had. I'm writing them down so they'll stick--and stay useful as idea-fodder, not because I expect you poor people to care.
The first was (or resembled) a Truman Capote novel, a sort of late-period 20th century meditation on declining male sexuality seen through the lens of either anthropological fiction or magical realism--I'm not sure which. In it, Capote (or "the narrator", since it was a Capote novel only by implication) finds himself in Tibet, or a place like Tibet. At first believing he is the only white man, he instead finds himself in the shadow of a fellow-researcher of whom the narrator has always been jealous, who attracts more attention and respect from the people there, especially from the young women. The narrator finds himself in a Watson-like role, recording the exploits of his friend while growing increasingly frustrated with both his friend and himself. Despite its meager plot, the novel spoke powerfully to the frustrations of people who, thinking they had escaped themselves, experienced something that once again made them who they always were. The novel ends abruptly with the two in burial shrouds, though it is implied that the narrator faked his own death--the friend did not.
The second is a trashy genre or perhaps book-list called "Havaoc," a 70s spy/martial arts thriller in the tradition of Clive Cussler, full of books with alluring covers that feature too many men in turtleneck-suits. The stories are full of beautiful women, barely coherent plots, and secret temples, with an emphasis on popular interpretations of martial arts techniques and a lot of technical information that is as detailed as it is nonsensical.
These two dreams amuse me not because they're particularly interesting, but because I can see my usual writing process in them, working even while I'm unconscious. Both are no more than combinations of things I've seen, tossed together as a bunch of interesting images, themes, and moods, with little in the way of a coherent plot-structure. I'm no good at plots. (Tabletop gaming will do that to you--plots aren't my job, after all.) The "Capote" novel is a combination of a handful of things I recently experienced, from In Cold Blood to Steven King discussing the origin of Carrie's themes to a David Foster Wallace article on the decaying trajectory of 20th century "literary" fiction to the new Great Gatsby movie (that "Watson-like" role is probably more "Carraway-like") to an article I read on sky burial to the hardcover copy of the book Alive, which I grew up staring at as a little kid and which, returning to my mother's house the other day, I saw in the same spot it always has occupied. By contrast, I think the "Havaoc" books (boy were they bad!) is my brain screaming at me to write a novel that normal people would want to read, prompted by Richard Kadrey tweeting that he found his books at an airport kiosk--a great triumph for the legitimacy of an old cyberpunk!
Thursday, September 25, 2008
Thoughts On the 40-Year Gap
A brief aside, before I return to what I've learned from other people telling bad stories. There's an old idea that SF writing lags about 40 years behind literature in terms of form and structure. The relevant quote is from Gary Westfahl:
"Thus, we find that science fiction readers of the 1960s were shocked and sometimes appalled when writers dared to try writing like James Joyce and John Dos Passos in the 1920s, and one reason that Neuromancer so stunned those readers in the 1980s was that William Gibson boldly and innovatively imported into science fiction the attitudes and style of the Raymond Chandler detective stories of the 1940s."
And I was just re-reading that and thinking, hey, I know, I can totally jump the curve by seeing what sort of SF will be coming out in about five years! It would be like the literature from the early 70s! Then I remembered, wait, what's my favorite bit of nominally "proper" literature? Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Published in 1972. So...I just spent a few minutes looking back and forth, back and forth, between Thompson's writing and my own, and the phrase "pale imitation" keeps bouncing around in my head. I'm a science fiction author lifting from literary styles that are almost exactly 40 years old.
Curses! Foiled again. Or I'm a genius. I'm not sure. No, I think it's just kind of sad and funny.
"Thus, we find that science fiction readers of the 1960s were shocked and sometimes appalled when writers dared to try writing like James Joyce and John Dos Passos in the 1920s, and one reason that Neuromancer so stunned those readers in the 1980s was that William Gibson boldly and innovatively imported into science fiction the attitudes and style of the Raymond Chandler detective stories of the 1940s."
And I was just re-reading that and thinking, hey, I know, I can totally jump the curve by seeing what sort of SF will be coming out in about five years! It would be like the literature from the early 70s! Then I remembered, wait, what's my favorite bit of nominally "proper" literature? Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Published in 1972. So...I just spent a few minutes looking back and forth, back and forth, between Thompson's writing and my own, and the phrase "pale imitation" keeps bouncing around in my head. I'm a science fiction author lifting from literary styles that are almost exactly 40 years old.
Curses! Foiled again. Or I'm a genius. I'm not sure. No, I think it's just kind of sad and funny.
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