Hiero's Journey

Hiero's Journey, written in 1973 by Stephen E. Lanier (who gave the go-ahead to publish Dune), features a Canadian battle-exorcist and his psychic moose, Klootz, as they journey across post-apocalyptic North America in the year 7000 AD to find a lost artifact called a "computer." They're joined in this quest by a bear (also psychic), a druid from a forgotten order of ecologists, and a runaway princess, and together they must overcome mushroom demons, mutants of all kinds, and a Dark Brotherhood of evil techno-wizards.

Let's talk about why Hiero's Journey isn't the best book ever written.It has everything, if by "everything" you mean "giant attack weasels" and "hypnotic axe-wielding lizard-men," but now people only remember the novel because it inspired Dungeons & Dragon's psionics rules.

And Hiero's Journey has a lot going for it. Its unapologetic absurdity has a dreamlike quality. I could imagine reading it as a child and then, as an adult, being amazed it was real and not just a confused misremembering of other, less ambitious, media. It has several dynamite scenes, including a thrilling escape from a fortress of evil psychics. Though the future of 7000 AD seems to contain only one woman, most of the characters are non-white (Hiero himself is a Metis), which is a novelty today, let alone in the seventies. And--in this age of ironic posturing--Hiero's Journey is invincibly, defiantly unironic. The main character is a future psi-Mountie and you are invited by the author either to buy into the fantasy or get out. I respect that.

But for all that, Hiero's Journey plods. Like with so much post-Tolkien-revival fiction, there's too much damn walking around, but the novel's problems are deeper than its occasional monotony, or its crude and over-enthusiastic prose. Hiero's Journey never winks or sneers at its material, which is a blessing, but it never really winks at all, or smiles, or plays with its conceits. Hiero himself is a gormless white-hat with all the complexity of a Lensman. He's a man out of time, a protagonist in the 70s who has definitely never smoked a joint, burned his draft card, or listened to The Doors. And he's not a reaction to those types of heroes--it's like Lanier doesn't even know the landscape has changed.

Our psychic protagonist's psychic deadness drags on the whole story, giving us prose that's flat and mechanical despite all the exclamation points, devoid of allusions that might enrich the (admittedly impressive) weird fauna and cultures of Lanier's world, despite all the piled-up adjectives. I have read prose containing less craft but rarely containing less ambition. Nothing sparkles.

The simplistic morality and joyless prose are significant faults, but Hiero's Journey offers something for the fantasy-history aficionado. This novel inspired Gary Gygax's D&D rules, and not just the psionic rules. (Or the threefold alignment system: Hiero's faux-Catholic church, the religion of his druid buddy, and the Satanic dark brotherhood, correspond neatly to Law, Neutrality, and Chaos, but so do many things.) But here's a more interesting question: does Hiero's Journey represent the source of LEVELING, as a concept in Dungeons & Dragons, and by extension as an element of most fantasy games today?

Here's an excerpt:

He was learning something the Abbey scholars of the mental arts were
just beginning to conceive, the fact that mental powers accrete in a
geometric, not arithmetical, progression, depending on how much and
how well they are used. The two battles Hiero had won...had
given...his already strong mind a dimension and power he would not
himself have believed possible. And the oddest thing was, he knew it.

(God, that prose is dire. The book contains several similar examples, but this one was the only one that didn't ramble for most of a page.)

Granted, this refers to psychic combat and psychic leveling. Also, early D&D rewarded more experience points for plunder than for combat. But perhaps the sheer mechanistic oddness of Hiero's "leveling" here, and the language used, inspired Gary as he formulated Dungeons & Dragons.

Hiero's Journey is an uneven and at times frustrating book. The ideas are excellent, the story serviceable, and often the action is thrilling, but leaden prose and lazy characterization hamper what might have been one of the best stories of its era. Read it because it's historically interesting, or because you've had your fill of sandy wastelands and want to see the weird end of the post-apocalypse.

But if you're looking for a book that's more than the sum of its parts, leave Hiero's Journey on the spinner rack.

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!

It's Not Just The *Better* Writers

I'm reading the latest issue of Weird Tales, which is a delightful magazine, although it seems even more enamored of its pedigree than I am, and reading a nonfiction entry got me thinking, along a series of barely-connected lines, that insanity used to be much more interesting. I don't know if it's improved psychiatry or the Internet's ability to help anyone find people like them, but the lone, distant madman has been replaced with whole message-boards full of sorry screwballs.

Go back to the 1930s and talk about someone who thinks he's the reincarnation of an elf and you have some quality crazy; hell, you can sell crazy of that caliber to Weird Tales. Now, everyone nods and says, "Yeah, an Otherkin. They're crazy." Yeah, they are, and there are thousands of 'em, all headbent in the same way, taking up psychic space where good ideas might go.

The writer of this article, who is not an Otherkin or a furry fetishist, describes her mental illness in lycanthropic terms, and I found myself thinking that what might once have been a clever conceit has been reduced to banality by over-exposure. Our writer also mentions the frustration of seeing her uniqueness reduced to a clinical definition, and I can sympathize there, because huge swaths of "modern occult fantasy" (insert your favorite genre name) has been reduced to a laughingstock, because our society is flooded with literary incompetence and dull-as-dirt clinical insanity.

Seriously, not to sound bitter, because I'm not--I'm...wryly amused...but: Try writing a story about a modern-day "elf" and you have to dodge all the cliches and nuttiness that has cropped up around the Otherkin movement. Write a story about werewolves and you have to avoid the tired psychoanalysis and pop-psychic explication of the "real" phenomenon. God help you if you want to give a character wings. This isn't the fault of psychiatry, or the Internet, or crazy weirdos...it's not even really the "fault" of our own greater self-awareness. Instead, it's inevitable in a genre (and in a society) that has such an accumulated cruft of what-has-been-done-before. But damn, I already have a loud enough internal editor, telling me that this isn't good enough and that isn't publishable; I don't need an eidolon carved out of our society's disappointment with its own fiction, snickering because the story I want to tell has a whole fanfiction fetish site full of maladjusted teenagers devoted to it.