M. Jonathan Jones's Blog: Spilt ink

No such thing as a new story

A few years ago, I had the idea for a series of political events which would cause a crisis between neighbouring kingdoms; the kind of trigger incident which is commonplace in fantasy. Mere weeks after my oh-so-bright idea, I discovered that almost exactly the same series of events had happened in the history of the Pagan Kingdom of what is today Myanmar. So if history has always done it before, why bother trying to invent new stuff: why not just ransack the richly stocked shelves of historical happenstance for plot ideas?

That's what quite a few fantasy writers do and have done, so it has a distinguished pedigree. George R. R. Martin; has said that part of the inspiration for A Game of Thrones and the rest of the Song of Ice and Fire series came from the English Wars of the Roses between the houses of Lancaster and York in the 15th century. Guy Gavriel Kay has his History with a Twist series, including Under Heaven set in China, and A Brightness Long Ago set in Italy; Kay's approach (which I've mentioned in reviews) steers between history and fantasy, a fact that has annoyed some people as being neither decent fantasy nor well-researched history, but there is a charm to his world(s). K. J. Parker does something quite similar (and very funny) with the Siege trilogy, starting with Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City, and Joe Abercrombie has merged two revolutions - the Industrial and the French - in his Age of Madness trilogy, starting with A Little Hatred; as that trilogy title suggests, this setting is very much a twisted Grimdark version of the 'Age of Reason' and the Enlightenment. I could expand this list to unfathomable lengths, but these are the ones I've read and enjoyed.

These books are all great in their own ways, and since many fantasy books are so obviously set in analogs of the real world (the current trend seems to favour China and East Asia), why not take your inspiration directly from the real world?

I was - and still am - in the throes of planning something similar. In 2017 I published The Outlaws of Kratzenfels, a (hopefully fun) bit of fluff set in the kind of vaguely central European location of many familiar fairy tales called Elbora. Kratzenfels evolved from an early story I wrote, very much in fairy tale format, with repetitions of threes in some events, called 'The Woodcutter and the War-walker', which was itself inspired by a picture by the Polish artist Jakub Różalski (who invented the boardgame 'Scythe'). Elbora is named after Europe (a bit of switching of sounds from 'Evropa') and I had intended it to be based on the distorted European cartography of the Middle Ages (later I noticed that Joe Abercrombie's maps for 'the Circle of the World' look very similar to the polar-centred projections of the northern hemisphere). I'm still working on Elbora, and indeed it has since generated some spin-off alternative history Europes; how these settings will evolve, as separate or eventually coaslescing I'm not yet sure. One thing is for sure, the real world offers us many fascinating settings and set-ups to explore, and the approach many people have taken of looking at alternative ways to view the world - and perhaps thereby seeing its problems in a fresh light - is unlikely to become history itself.

Nobody's Favourite Book...

...is a parody. That's not the conclusion to any kind of rigorous scientific analysis, so I might be wrong (and if I am, I would guess that the fantastic Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons has a good chance of being the exception to my speculative rule), but parodies are odd beasts, usually parasitic things aiming for cheap laughs at the expense of something many people like. So why did I write one, especially about one of my favourite books ever?

I suppose the simplest answer is that I felt compelled to. I read a book review once that criticised a marketing approach to success in self-publishing by saying that book ideas were not born from tables of what is selling (much to the consternation no doubt of many agents and editors, and to the disappointed authors seeking their favour), but that book ideas came out of nowhere and "burnt a hole in your soul until you wrote them down." Once I spotted the parallel between Bilbo Baggins and any foppish bachelor protagonist of almost any book by P. G. Wodehouse, I was off, thinking about the other books published while J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, the music of the era, films in the cinema, music on the wireless and on the pancake-thick wedges of vinyl that passed for recorded media back then. Writing The Robbit: Or Turned Out Nice Again also allowed me to address some of the things which (privately) had always niggled me about The Hobbit, like Bilbo's obsession with Elves, Thorin being wholly in the right in his speech to Bard and the Elven KIng at the Great Gate, the dubious strategy of burglary to regain Erebor, and burglary involving a mysterious door only accessible once a year (and how? did the flake of stone over the keyhole grow back?), the disposal of sewage at Lake-town, Beorn's dancing animals, why there are (apparently) no female dwarves, and why it was that anyone would make a path through MIrkwood that you Should Not Leave (among other things).

Anyway, it has been almost a year since I published The Robbit, and while it hasn't garnered as many ratings as I'd hoped (and despite the outlay of a Goodreads Giveway, more fool me), it's received an excellent review from The Book Life Prize 2024, which I can summarise as: “fun and creative …consistently engaging…a sharp and inventive Tolkien parody—and an entertaining story to boot... energized by humorous and dynamic stretches of dialogue.” Praise indeed, and especially welcome because I'd tried hard to make the story feel like a real story, and not like a connected series of vignettes, each one poking fun at a different element of the source.

I feel duty bound to include one downside, and that was the comment: "Jones's text is funny, lyrical, and poetic, benefitting from meticulous attention to detail and sharp characterization. Though the simple, accessible writing style is pleasant to read, the level of constant parody does occasionally become wearisome." In defence of that last point, I'd agree that constant humour can become wearing - I certainly can only take such giants as Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, and the aforementioned P. G. Wodehouse in small doses - and when writing a parody you're keenly aware of the risk of the book becoming guilty more of plagiarism than parody if it strays too far from its source material.

Tolkien tells us that Gandalf was never one to stop short of recounting how clever he'd been, and setting my broad-brimmed hat firmly on my head and jutting out my eyebrows, one final point I feel inclined to mention is the presence in the book of what I think is the world's first ever bilingual English-Sindarin pun. Ten points* to anyone who ever posts it here.

(*Points is all you get, I'm afraid.)

Lying fallow

In regions of the central highlands of New Guinea, the swidden agricultural population leave fields fallow for anything from 15 to 45 years...
Just one of the facts I've learnt while reading, reading, reading (and reading) about anthropology, ethnography, history, religion, and political science in a bid to make my worldbuilding less off-the-peg and western-centric.

I don't read as much fiction as I would like to, but when I do I'm often struck by how the cast of characters could have been pulled from my local coffee shop in terms of outlook and behaviour. You can see why people do this: all writers are told to make their characters relatable for their readers (feels like 'relatable to' would be better, but either phrasing is ugly), and the easiest way to do that is to make characters Just Like Them. Historians argue about how different e.g. the mediaeval mindset was from our own: not very, many believe, and I'd join them. The basics are the same anywhere and anytime - it's what makes us human. But all the same, it's vital to consider how the world might look to someone who lives in a very socially stratified society where economic ambition counts for nothing, or where slavery is commonplace (which would be just about every non-hunter-gatherer culture on the planet - we all have slaves and slavers in our DNA; it was the only way to get stuff done in a subsistence society lacking modern technology). Twists and nuances are what I'm after, just to give things a more realistic edge.

Religion is a case in point. Turns out Abrahamic religions are very unusual in many ways, and most people's beliefs for most of human history have been much simpler and more akin, on a daily basis, to horoscopes and rabbit's feet; in other words, keeping Fate on your side rather than burning the Unbelievers in the name of the Universal Truth that your own prophet of choice happens to have had revealed to them.

Writing-wise, stuff is bubbling away, I have plenty of ideas, sometimes I'll write a scene or two - I have a couple of shorts (maybe 50-60k) I wanted to put out in 2024, but that probably won't happen now unless I get cracking.
I'm hoping the fields will be ready for the next sowing in less than the 15 years that the Enga people often have to endure, and when that crop comes, I hope it will be all the better for a bit of time lying fallow.

43 Words about AI

Another post about AI: ChatGPT 4.0 is improving. Below is some short fiction it crafted inspired by first and last lines which I selected but which it invented separately. Impressive, but you know no human soul was behind it, and it lacks something.

The prophecy spoke of a hero, but the only thing that came was a plague, and it devoured everything.
For generations, the people of Varngard clung to the words of the ancient prophecy. It promised a savior, a warrior born of the stars who would rise in their darkest hour to vanquish the evil that festered in the land. When the skies above the mountains turned blood-red and the winds carried the scent of death, the elders proclaimed that the time had come. They prayed, fasted, and lit the sacred fires, awaiting the hero foretold.
But no hero came.
Instead, a pestilence emerged from the mountains, creeping down the slopes like a silent assassin. It began in the villages closest to the peaks, where the air grew heavy with sickness, and the earth itself seemed to rot. The first to die were the young and the old, their bodies twisted with fever and their eyes clouded with pain. Soon, the disease spread to every corner of the kingdom, sparing none in its path.
The priests and scholars sought answers in their scrolls and relics, but the plague cared nothing for their prayers or rituals. It swept through the grandest halls and the humblest homes, bringing kings and beggars alike to their knees. The land that had once been rich with life became a desolate graveyard, its people reduced to shadows of their former selves. Fields lay fallow, and the rivers ran thick with the ashes of the dead.
In the heart of Varngard, in the capital of Myrdal, the last of the royal line, Princess Elara, watched her kingdom crumble. She was no hero—just a girl with a crown too heavy for her head and a heart burdened with guilt. Her people had looked to her for salvation, and she had failed them. The prophecy was a lie, she thought bitterly, a cruel joke played on a doomed people.
As the plague closed in on the capital, the whispers began. Some said that the prophecy had been misunderstood, that the hero was not a warrior but a sacrifice. Desperate and broken, Elara listened to these whispers, and in the ruins of her palace, she found the ancient blade—the weapon said to have been forged in the fires of the gods.
The blade was cold to the touch, its surface etched with runes long forgotten. It hummed with an energy that made her bones ache, and Elara knew what she had to do. With trembling hands, she drove the blade into her heart, her blood staining the stones beneath her feet.
The plague began to recede, the dark clouds lifting as if in response to her sacrifice. The people who survived spoke of a miracle, of how their princess had given her life to save them. But the land remained scarred, the fields barren, the rivers poisoned. The few who lived bore the marks of the plague on their flesh and in their souls.
Myrdal, once a beacon of hope, was now a city of ghosts. The prophecy had been fulfilled, but not in the way the people had expected. No hero had come to save them—only death and ruin.
The curse was lifted, but the scars remained, a reminder that some battles should never be fought.

Time travel part 2 - Nolan's 'Tenet' (2020)

This is the second part of my blog posts on time travel: the first will appear sometime later. (See what I did there?).

So, Christopher Nolan's 2020 'Tenet' is a film, not a book, but as I'm lining up a read of This is How You Lose the Time War it's kind of vaguely relevant. Vaguely. Plus, I wanted a rant about the over-hyped mess that is 'Tenet'. It's a cool film in many ways but a disaster in others, and that's all down to two things that any story in any medium has to get right: in-universe consistency, and decent plotting. 'Tenet' fails on both scores, and watching people try to make sense of something which was put together without any true adherence to logic is frustrating (like the often violent debates about the nature of the Trinity in Christianity). Spoilers aplenty coming up: you have been warned.

The basic idea of 'Tenet' is very cool: that the flow of time can be reversed for objects or people, such that they move backwards against the forwards flow, essentially experiencing sequences of events in reverse. I love how this constrains the way time travel works - it's a breath of fresh air (you'll see later how clever this particular comment is) compared with the staid old 'time-teleportation' idea of something like Dr Who's Tardis. But the problem starts because Nolan cannot leave the idea at that: he has to bring the physics of reverse entropy into it, and as soon as he does this he causes major issues for himself and the way the film works.

It is explained that inverted people (maybe we should call them 'extratemporal aliens') cannot breathe uninverted air because of the way energy flows. This 'fact' means that anyone who is inverted has to wear a facemask with a similarly inverted oxygen supply, which is a great visual clue that someone has been inverted (alongside people moving backwards, which inverts do not always do; see below on Neil). When the Protagonist is inverted and steps through the airlock into the world where time flows backwards, he is told "You may experience distortions to vision and hearing." No sh*t! Let's look at this comment in more detail.

We see because photons are emitted from a light source, strike an object, and are reflected as visible light (with spectral shifts seen as colour depending on which wavelengths have been reflected). Now imagine that in reverse: the photon travels from the eyeball of someone living in the inverted time (a native invert) back to the object, has its wavelengths restored to those of the light source, and travels back to that source. To give an example, from the eye to a flower, from the flower to the sun. Now to see the flower, an inverted extratemporal alien has to intercept the shifted light ray after it strikes the object and before it returns to the source. In other words, if you want to see a flower, you have to stand with your back to it so that your retina collects the rays of light radiating backwards to the object: you see what is behind you. Another consequence of intercepting the 'retreating' photons with your inverted body is that I think you might cast a shadow towards the light source. Hearing works in effectively the same way: when time travels forwards, someone whacking a hammer on your right sends sound waves travelling outwards in all directions, but since we have two ears, let's say we're standing side on to them and the sound travels right to left. When inverted, those sound waves travel back to the source, so you would collect the sound waves as they retrace their paths. In other words, you would hear someone hammering on your right with your left ear, as the sound waves travelled backwards along their path from left to right. Complicated? Yes. Unworkable... Erm, no, but it's way more complex than running film backwards as Nolan does (albeit in some highly imaginative and impressive ways), and that's also true of cause and effect in general, as we'll see later.

This problem of reverse energy flow bedevils everything. There is a scene in which the inverted Protagonist is trapped in a car fire: the fire causes the water vapour in the air inside the car to freeze, and when the Protagonist regains consciousness in safety sometime later, it's explained that he suffered hypothermia not burns from the fire, because the flow of energy is reversed. OK. That seems logical, but... That means that the sunlight striking the inverted Protagonist cools him, not warms him, and his own sweat rather than cooling him will heat him up - either could be deadly over even short periods of time if your inverted biology is still working 'forwards' to give you a subjective sense of moving into "the future in the past". Friction works in reverse too, and trying to push over an object, or pick one up, will not work: the pushed object will pull, picking up will push down. In other words, an extratemporal alien cannot interact with objects in the inverted world in any way as they would normally. By the way, the car fire scene is one of the worst in the whole film. It looks cool, and it's necessary from a narrative perspective to see the Protagonist deal with being inverted alone before we see the big battle at the end, but not only does the scene highlight the physical inconsistencies of the way time inversion is portrayed, it also ends with the Protagonist blacking out and then waking up having been mysteriously rescued. In other words, I don't think Nolan knew how to link it back into the rest of the story, and it shows.

Let's get on to cause and effect. If time runs backwards, then effect precedes cause. The scene which explains this has the Technician catching a bullet which leaps up from the table, and also the Protagonist firing a gun 'in reverse'; I'll get to the gun in a minute, but for now, let's stick with the leaping bullet. The Technician shows a film running backwards and forwards of the bullet jumping into/falling from her hand, and says of cause and effect that it doesn't really matter which way we view the event. This is correct as an observer watching film being run backwards, but it's not true for someone living in inverted time. A native invert would already remember having dropped the bullet. As the bullet leaps up into their hand, so too the memory of them dropping it (in the past, but what seems like the reverse-flowing 'future') is present in their head, but it's being 'unmade'. That means that native inverts have a memory of the 'future cause' of current events; an extratemporal alien invert would not have those memories, and so cause would seem mysterious. Again, this is something which works in film where we see events portrayed from outside; if 'Tenet' had been a book, the rather boring fact that native inverts simply remember the 'future cause' of current events would be obvious. As long as you don't think about the film and just watch it, all is well; but Nolan wants you to think about it, and as soon as you do, such inconsistencies start to build up. And that gun: squeezing the trigger of a non-inverted gun will not fire an inverted bullet. You need an inverted gun, and you'd need to 'release' the trigger for the whole mechanism to work in reverse: more inconsistencies.

I'm going to finish with some points about the events in the film rather than the idea of time inversion. The first point is about Neil's statement that "What's happened's happened." The second point is about 'Tenet' being a work of cinematic fiction rather than a truly insightful investigation into time inversion; this latter point reinforces the idea that thinking about 'Tenet' as a consistent work of logic is pointless. My third point contradicts that previous statement, and I try to think logically is about the stated in-universe timing of events, and what that might mean for the Protagonist and the whole idea of a 'temporal pincer movement'.

First, Neil. One of Neil's roles in the film is to explain (to the Protagonist, and to the audience) how time inversion works; Ives and Wheeler get some credit for that too, but it's Neil who most often takes the lead in explaining stuff, because despite his recruitment being apparently later than the Protagonist, he knows more about time inversion (he says he has a Masters in Physics). Most of the time, Neil's pronouncements about how time inversion works are valid, but this is, in my view, a trick to set up the audience so that they believe him when he says "What's happened's happened" to suggest that events cannot be changed; in fact, we see repeatedly in the film that Neil is wrong / lying here. We see very early on that someone - later suggested to be Neil himself - rescues the Protagonist at the opera siege by 'inverse' shooting of an assailant who has the Protagonist at his mercy (the saviour is wearing a mask so we don't see their face, but we do get a close-up of the string hanging from their bag which suggests Neil; the mask means they could be inverted. It's notable too that if inverted, their actions run in the same 'direction' as others around them: they do not run backwards). So, here Neil has changed events to save the Protagonist. At the end, the Protagonist saves Kat from being shot by Priya's hitman, another indication of intervening in the past to change things. The exploding building in the battle at the end is another example: it can only exist because the sequence of events has been changed. These events, plus the scene with the car fire and the loss of the algorithm, show that Neil's statement is a lie: we can change the past. This perhaps also explains why Neil is so unconcerned about his upcoming death - "I'll get them on the next pass" he says, and this time maybe he means it. The way I view this is like when you build a Lego model and get to the end of the build with a vital piece still not in place: you misread the instructions, and way back on page 5 you did something wrong and omitted the unused piece. You can correct this by completely unbuilding the model or, as I usually try first, you work out how to break the model minimally to fit the piece in, then make further repairs as you go. Sometimes, this requires several different 'waves' of breaking and repairing. In the same way, changing events in the past, Tenet-style, involves fixing one thing at a time, until eventually the model is in one piece. Multiple iterations are required to get to the stage where maybe the Protagonist doesn't even attend the opera siege, or Sator isn't recruited in the first place. "It's the bomb that doesn't go off that has the power to change the world," as Neil says. Or the organisation which was never created.

Second, the cinematic aspect of the film should not be ignored. Take the scene at the end with Kat in danger from Priya's hitman. Would an organisation like Tenet seriously shoot Kat in broad daylight outside her son's school just before she picked him up? No. They'd stage a break in at Kat's place at night when she was asleep, and make it look like her death was the result of a botched burglary (with enough hints to those in the know that there was a connection to Sator and his past to cover Tenet's tracks twice over). So that scene is pure cinema. Similarly, the car fire scene which I've criticised above: it's there to give the Protagonist a solitary experience of inversion, but it's poorly done in terms of how it ends (why doesn't Sator just shoot him?) and what happens next. These observations show that, despite Nolan's alleged respect for the audience, some aspects of the film - and there may be another one coming up - do not make logical sense in-universe. Added to the problems with the physics discussed above, we can see that trying to understand Tenet in logical terms may be doomed to fail.

Finally, applying logic anyway! When the Protagonist meets Sir Michael Caine (ahem, sorry, Crosby) in the restaurant, Sir Michael gives us a fixed timepoint for the opera siege: two weeks ago. Nolan did not have to give us this information, and if he felt it was necessary, he could have picked any number: 3 weeks ago, 6 weeks ago, 6 months ago. He says '2 weeks'. Now, in those 2 weeks, the Protagonist has 1) been captured and tortured at length, 2) 'died' for an unspecified time, 3) been rescued and conveyed to what looks like the Baltic/North Sea, 4) had his mouth rebuilt from the torture and had time to heal perfectly, 5) spent at least one and maybe two nights in a wind turbine, 6) travelled ashore to meet the Technician for a detailed briefing, 7) travelled to Mumbai, 8) met Neil and prepared the incursion to meet Priya, 9) carried out the incursion and talked to Priya, 10) flown to London to meet Sir Michael. I would suggest that doing all this in 2 weeks is impractical/impossible, and the single event of healing the Protagonist's wounds alone should have taken at least 12 days even before anything else happened. So is this just shoddiness, like the car fire scene? Is it deliberate misdirection, like Neil saying you can't change the past? Or is it an indication that the Protagonist had already been inverted then 'reverted', 'changing gear' like Neil does at the end, to heal in time to tidy things up? I'd like to think the latter is true.

(I should add here: there are plenty of other examples, like the Protagonist driving the non-inverted car, the air inside freezing even though it was non-inverted, etc. etc,; that for the Protagonist to meet Neil in the past he has to live backwards for many years (ageing as he does?) and then revert; and that you can only change the past if you invert and then 'change gear' to act forwards again. In other words, the post above deals only with the most obvious bits).

So, 'Tenet': a great idea, an intriguing cinematic spectacle, but something that falls far short of a logical investigation of inversion as a novel way of looking at time travel.

Batten down the hatches - Tethys Trilogy One Volume E Book 8th Feb 2024

I have finally got round to stitching together the three parts of the Tethys Trilogy (that's Ultramarine, Thalassa: Aqua Incognita, and Thalassa: Fire and Flood) into a single volume e-book. Oh, and doing a cover. It's out on Thursday 8th February on Amazon. . The book page is here.

Free book promotion will run on Kindle Friday 9th-Sunday 11th February 2024. Link via the book page above,

Coming Dec 1st: The Robbit - Or Turned Out Nice Again

On December 1st 2023, my next book, a parody and satire of J. R. R. Tolkien's The Hobbit, will be published on Kindle and as a paperback. This is a book which I hadn't planned to write, but once I started I couldn't stop. I love The Hobbit but it has its shortcomings, both as a book and as a story; one thing that always grated with me was how meek a dwarvish warrior-king like Thorin was when captured by the hated Goblins. Tolkien clearly had a good sense of humour and he was never happy with the first half of The Hobbit - he wanted to rewrite it - so I hope he would have appreciated what I've done and why. I've also tried to give the whole thing a 1930s feel, reflecting the era in which it appeared. Here is the first chapter:

Chapter 1 – Destiny. And Revenge.

In a hole in the ground, there lived a dwarf.
The hole was a nasty, damp, foul-smelling pit hacked out of a pile of slag on a barren mountainside, but dwarves are not averse to roughing it, and to this particular dwarf the hole was Home.
To keep out the worst of the sleet that blew in across the peaks, the dwarf had propped up a thick slab of slate across the entrance, and it was upon this slab that someone was knocking. Knocking hard, with something even harder, made of metal.
The dwarf roused himself from his slumbers – he’d only come off shift down the mines a short time before – and he picked up a just-in-case pickaxe before thrusting aside the slab and taking a look at who was bothering him.
Grey boots, dusty and down at heel, reached to the knees. A long way to the knees; it was no dwarf beneath that cloak, also grey, which swaddled the tall thin figure like a thundercloud swaddles the heart of the storm. In one hand, the stout iron-shod staff that had done all the knocking. A long beard, as jagged as lightning, struck out from beneath a wide-brimmed hat. In the shadow of the brim, the glint of eyes, fire-flicker fierce. And everything, from head to foot, as grey as the ash from a forgotten forge.
The dwarf peered up and stuck out his own beard. His whiskers were not so fine these days but his pride was there somewhere, buried deep, and even when they have lost everything else, dwarves can still dig.
“Eyup! What’s tha want? [1]”
“I seek,” said the tall grey figure, in half-decent dwarvish, “the King Inside the Mountain.”
The dwarf chuckled, and switched to his own tongue.
“That loser? This time of day you’ll find him in the Pick and Shovel.” He pointed a stubby finger down the cinder track which led to a straggle of ugly buildings. “Follow the smell.”
The tall figure followed the dwarf’s gaze, and nodded.
“Much obliged.”
He flicked a silver piece in the air with his thumb, sending the coin spinning.
The dwarf reached out and grabbed it, and watched the grey stranger go striding away towards the town.
“King Inside the Mountain,” he grunted. “What a waste of ale!”

The grey stranger found the Pick and Shovel easily enough without the need to follow the smell; a lucky thing too, since there were many smells to choose from, and none of them good.
The Pick and Shovel was no homely mountain tavern, but a long low structure built of splits of stone that were no use for anything else. Wood was in short supply in mining-country, and the fragrant forests which had once clad the mountainsides were all gone, hacked down and turned into pit-props. What remained of the trees held up the slopes where once they had thrown down deep, strong roots; not strong enough or deep enough to save them from the blow of the axe. Even the tables inside the tavern were hewn from blocks of stone. Only the vague rectangle of the stage was made of warped planks of wood that had been cut rough and worn smooth.
The stranger bought himself a mug of ale from the barkeep – human-breed, like most in the tavern – and settled himself to watch what passed for evening entertainments.
First up was a one-armed juggler, the victim of some mining accident who had tried to convert the heavy grey lead of his misfortune into gold. He threw and caught with his one hand, bouncing the balls in mid-air off one knee or the other, or his shoulders or his shiny bald head. He garnered a few shouts of appreciation, rather more of derision, and a mixture of thrown coins and bottle-tops (most of which he successfully caught) for his pains.
Next onto the warped stage came a magician, the usual bearded charlatan, wrapped in a star-stitched cloak and with a pointed black hat on his head.
“Ludicrous garb,” growled the grey stranger.
He watched with growing disdain as the magician removed his capacious hat and plucked from it fake flowers and floppy fish and playing cards. The crowd responded with some lazy clapping; seen it all before, and too drunk to care.
The grey stranger had seen it all before too, but even two sups into his ale his malice was brimming over. He muttered a few words, drew a discreet sigil in the air with two fingers on his left hand, and rubbed the same two fingers together. Almost at once a small fire kindled inside the fake magician’s hat, blazing up with a crackle.
“How’d ‘e do that?” drawled a bleary eyed pit-man at the neighbouring table, and he and the rest of the crowd reacted to this new aspect of the well-worn routine with furious applause. The surprised magician, meanwhile, had already dashed off the stage in search of water for his hat and something stronger for himself.
“And now,” bellowed the master of ceremonies, “the all singing, all dancing, King Inside the Mountain and His Coal Porters!”
With a drumroll, seven small shapes came spinning out from the wings. They went head-over-heels halfway across the stage, then leapt up, becoming a dwarf somewhere in mid-air. They landed in a semi-circle, each one with a different coloured beard – blue, yellow, red, green, orange, purple, and silver – all of them sparkling with tiny specks of stardust. Ground glass and metal shavings, but in the glare of the lights they glittered like Elven-kind.
Their cheeks were painted red and their eyes were rimmed with black, and they held musical instruments in their hands: a flute, two fiddles, a clarinet, two viols, and a harp. With a rhythmic stamp of their heavy feet, they started to sing:

When we dig in the delvings,
It brings back the sound of mining so tender,
Of building such fi-i-i-ine subterranean splendour,
When we dig in the delvings.

I’m with you once more under the earth,
And down in the depths, we dwarves are all singing,
Forges are lit, and hammers are ringing,
When we dig in the delvings.

To mine so deep down is what we endeavour,
With picks in our hands we fill our minecarts,
To find gems and jewels, and wealth never-ending,
When we dig in the delvings.

The grey stranger watched the dwarves go through their set, a string of popular musical favourites. The crowd, by this point in the evening far too drunk to do more than roar along, had slipped into that narrow gap between good-natured complacency and sudden violence. One man staggered onto the stage, perhaps to partner one of the dwarves in a dance, or to discuss the finer points of musical taste with his fists, but the dwarf he singled out simply stepped aside, whipped the man’s legs out from under him, and rolled him into the sawdust and spittle on the floor.
The routine finished with no further incident, and as the dwarves bowed and made their way off the stage, the stranger pulled from his cloak a small piece of parchment, a writing quill, and a vial of ink. He scribbled a note and handed it to a passing bar-hand together with another piece of silver and a gesture towards the stage.
It did not take long for the note to bring results. The stranger had barely drunk two more sups from his flagon of ale when the dwarves reappeared in the wings, some still with painted faces and sparkling beards, and they made their way to the stranger’s table.
One of them stepped forwards, a dwarf with broad shoulders even for that race, and a nose like a pick. “You write decent dwarvish.”
The grey stranger gave him an angular shrug beneath his cloak.
“It comes in handy from time to time in my business.”
“Which is?”
The grey stranger seemed to smile beneath his beard.
“I seek the King Inside the Mountain.”
“That’s just my stage name. I’m not yet king. It’s my father you seek, Thrawn son of Thrifty, and he’s not here,” the dwarf replied. “The last time I saw him, he was –”
“– heading off to reclaim his ancient kingdom, fifty-three years, five months, two weeks, and three days ago last Thursday. And I know whom it is that I seek, Thorny Brokenshield. I seek you, the true and rightful King Inside the Mountain!”
“You mean my father –”
“I am afraid so. My condolences.”
The other six dwarves knelt before Thorny with looks of reverence and respect.
“Hail King Thorny!” they shouted in unison.
“Arise my kinfolk,” replied Thorny gravely. “We long suspected as much. Ogg had that twinge in his knees. Thrawn has returned to the Halls of Our Fathers, but as we dwarves believe, he shall walk again among us. Arise and be merry, as my father Thrawn would have wished.”
“Well said, Your Highness!” The dwarf with a hint of red in his beard slapped Thorny on the back. “Get a round in!”
“In good time. First, I will hear more from this grey stranger. Who are you, and how do you know of my father’s death?”
“My name is Grendelf the Beige.”
“Beige? Grey, surely?”
“Nay, such are my travails, and so many miles have I travelled upon the road, that my raiment is quite faded. I will have to get it dyed again sometime. As I was saying, I am Grendelf, and I am a wizard. These are your kinsfolk and trusted companions?”
“Aye. Grog, Flog, Blog, Nog, Ogg, and Zog. You don’t look much like a wizard.”
“And you do not look like a king. Not yet. But all that glitters is not go-”
“Goats!” said Grog sharply.
“Goalkeepers!” said Nog.
“Gossamer!” said Zog.
“Goshawks!” said Blog.
“Gonorrhoea!” said Flog.
“Go on,” Grog said, giving Thorny a nudge with one elbow. “Get a round in, then we’ll have a proper natter.”
Thorny gave a solemn nod, and stomped off in the direction of the bar.
The other dwarves hauled over a huge stone table and some extra chairs, and sat themselves down around it.
Grog scowled at Flog. “All that glitters is not gono-bloody-rrhoea?”
“Sorry. Been on my mind lately.”
“No doubt.” Grog turned to Grendelf, “It’s the ‘g’ word. Sets Thorny off into a berserker rage. He’s never got over what the dragon did, and losing all that gold.”
Grendelf nodded.
“Understandable. He still has his pride then, and his honour? Even dancing and singing in an ale-house?”
The dwarves, their faces painted and beards dyed, each gave an uncomfortable shuffle.
“There’s honour, and there’s honour. We tried digging coal for a while, but humans have no style. Dig it out any way they can, quick and dirty. We were carting out ten times as much stone as coal and the mine-owners didn’t like it, but the galleries we made... A palace, every one.”
“I can imagine that did not go down well here.”
“Unprofitable, apparently. But we’ve stuck with Thorny, and we’ll stick yet,” Grog said, eyes flashing. “I warn you, wizard. If you’ve come to trick him –”
“Trick him? Nothing could be further from my mind, I assure you. I have only his best interests at heart.”
“A wizard? Doing someone a favour? First I’ve bloody heard!”
With a clink and a curse, Thorny reappeared, thick arms cradling a bevvy of beakers, all foaming full of ale. He slopped his burden down onto the table, and with a cheer of thanks, the dwarves and Grendelf helped themselves.
“A good start to your reign, Thorny lad,” Nog said, wiping the foam from his beard with his forearm. “You get my vote!”
“You daft beggar! That’s not how it works,” Ogg hissed.
“No?”
“No. It’s the more in the way of absolute power and a complete lack of accountability.”
“Sounds good to me! Just keep the ale coming!”
“So,” Thorny said, scowling across the table at Grendelf. “Tell me: how do you come to know about the death of my father?”
Grendelf put down his flagon of ale, and gave his head a solemn shake. “Ah, a sorry, sorry tale it is, indeed.”
“And?”
“Well, you will recall how after you and your folk were driven from the Only Mountain by the evil dragon Smog –”
“Curse his name!”
“ – that your grandfather, Thrifty the Careful, was killed by a Bogrol in the dark depths of Khazi Dunny eighty-six years, two hundred and thirteen days ago last Monday afternoon at four.”
“Aye! Curse the Bogrols! It is past time we flushed their kind for ever from the porcelain tunnels of Khazi Dunny!”
“Indeed. And thereafter you and your father and your dwindling number of allies wandered lost between the Murky Mountains and the wilds of Bellenderland.”
“Obviously. We were there. Get on with it. How did my father meet his end? And how do you come to know of it?”
“Your father, Thrawn, left you and went in search – “
“Yes. Yes. Out with it, wizard.”
“I found your father, broken from torture, a prisoner in the dungeons of the Fancyshmancer.”
The dwarves all shared a baleful look, and a shudder that left no lap free of ale.
“The Fancyshmancer?” Thorny said. “What the chuffin’ ‘eck was my father doing there?”
“I know not,” Grendelf replied. “But there he was.”
“Odd. I don’t remember him saying owt about going off anywhere near the Fancyshmancer. He did say how he might try to find a helpful wizard, maybe persuade him to broker an alliance with some well-disposed elvish lord to try to take back the Kingdom Inside The Mountain.”
“Ah.” Grendelf’s ale stopped just short of his lips. “He... er... he did?”
“Aye. ‘Surely,’ he said, ‘they’ll be interested in helping us out. I mean, if the Fancyshmancer finally reveals himself and marches out to cover the lands with darkness, having a dragon on your back’s not going to help much, is it? And they’re going to need the power of the Kingdom Inside the Mountain to throw down that dark lord.’ His exact words.”
“Right.” Grendelf looked thoughtful for a moment. But only for a moment. “Anyway, enough of all that boring geopolitical nonsense. You yourself have not felt the urge to return to the Only Mountain?”
“Fate has not yet decreed it. We keep casting the runes, but they’re useless.”
“They did predict that business with the chickens,” said Flog.
“Aye, that they did. But nothing about the kingdom.”
“Hmmm,” said Grendelf, stroking his beard. “It may be you have a faulty set. Try mine.”
He produced a set of runes, carved from a substance so black they seemed to suck all the light into them.
“These runes were carved from a lump of bog oak that had lain for five hundred years in the dark and haunted waters of the Swamp of Slaughtered Souls, the drowned battlefield of Bellenderland. They are soaked full of arcane knowledge gleaned from the tortured spirits who remain there.”
“Nice one!” Thorny clapped his hands together. “Let’s give it a go!”
He cast the runes. The dwarves all leant forwards, peering at the scatter of carven shapes.
“Stranger... Grey cloak.... A sign or token... Kingdom... Vengeance... Fire and glory!”
The dwarves glanced around at each other, then as one they looked at Grendelf.
“Bloody Norah!”
Thorny hunched forwards eagerly. “And, grey-cloaked stranger, you’ve not got a sign or a token about you, by any chance?”
“Will this do?” Grendelf reached under his cloak and drew forth a scroll of parchment which he unrolled upon the table.
The dwarves surged forwards, leaning over it. “A map of the Only Mountain!”
“Indeed it is. It shows a secret entrance here,” Grendelf pointed with one long finger, “which you might use to gain access and have your revenge upon Smog!”
“But where did you get it?”
“From your father, before he died. He long resisted the torture of the Fancyshmancer, and where he hid this on his person I cannot say, but at the last it was all he could remember, and eventually I managed to force... er, to prevail upon him to give it to me. So that I might seek you out and pass it on to you, his heir! Not that he told me who you were or where to find you. I pressed him quite warmly, quite warmly indeed, but he outright refused to tell me.”
“He refused?”
“Did I say that? I meant he was confused. It’s taken me years to track you down.”
Thorny and the others studied the map for a while, eyes glittering with hope. At the last, the dwarf king gave his head a shake and clicked his tongue.
“It’s tempting, but... Nobody knows better than a dwarf how hopeless it is to confront a dragon in a fair fight with a frontal assault.” He touched the map with rueful fingers. “Even with the benefit of a surprise sneak attack from the side... If we had a hundred dwarves, maybe. But we’re seven. I don’t see how this really changes anything.”
“Ah, my dear Thorny. But it does. I have someone in mind who may be able to help you out.”
“Must be a very special someone.”
“Oh, indeed. Indeed he is.”
“What kind of someone?”
“A holbit.”
“What the flaming fandango is a ‘holbit’?”
Grendelf drew back into his stoney seat and steepled his fingers, trying for sagacious, and managing more than adequately.
“The name ‘holbit’ derives from the phrase ‘hole-biter’ in the Standard Speech, since in ages past it was believed – and it may well once have been true – that the ancestors of the holbits used their rather prominent front incisors to gnaw the communities of burrows in which they live.”
“Prominent front teeth?”
“Yes. And small round eyes, and soft pink skin. They tend to be a little on the roly-poly side –”
“They sound like mole-rats. Are you sure you don’t mean mole-rats?”
“No, no, I assure you. Holbits are most distinct from mole-rats. Well. Not entirely distinct, admittedly, and there may be some connection far back in the dim and distant primordial past... But these days holbits are sentient. Or profess to be. They are shorter than dwarves, and clean shaven, with tousled mops of curly hair upon their bumpkinish heads. You did not encounter any on your travels from the Only Mountain?”
“Maybe. They sound familiar. But I’m still seeing mole-rats. I still fail to see how one single holbit can make a difference to our plight.”
“That we shall see,” said Grendelf. “But harken, Thorny: this is no chance meeting between us. This is fate, for with this map and my help, you are sure to get your revenge upon Smog. This is your destiny!”
“Aye!” shouted the dwarves with a single voice, and they leapt to their feet, mugs in hands, and drank down their ale in one gulp. “Destiny! Revenge!”
“Destiny, indeed,” Grendelf echoed softly. “And revenge.”

[1] Dwarvish speech is rendered throughout by the accent of Sheffield in Yorkshire, England, famed as ‘the City of Steel’ and a place of forges and furnaces. Literally ‘Hey there! What dost thou want?’, which may be translated more politely as ‘Good day! Who breaks my peace?’

An Eye on AI

AI - and if you've been hiding under a rock for the past few years (I wouldn't blame you) - that's artificial intelligence, has become A Big Thing, no longer restricted to computing labs or behind the scenes with Big Tech, but actually available to us members of the hoi poloi. There is understandably a lot of concern about the potential for AI to replace huge swathes of working humanity, leaving them to scratch around for a living while big companies offload services to Human Intellect 2.0, and also a lot of noise has been made about the potential for copyright infringment during training of the AI 'models'. I can't comment on the workings of the tech itself and as anyone who's ever looked into copyright infringement knows, it's a minefield of interpretation, much more art than science. Anyway, a month ago and with a book almost in the bag, I decided to have a look for myself, and in this post I'm going to report what I think I've found out. AI is always evolving, much like we its creators, and my experience is limited to Chat GPT (other AIs are available) so my thoughts may well change. But as of October 2023, here's what I found.

I'm now much less concerned about copyright issues than I was, at least in the field of text-based AI generation. A major issue remains, which is whether training an AI constitutes storing copyright material electronically; that's obviously a big no-no, but do the algorithms actually store the data itself so that it could be reverse engineered, or an 'impression' of the data, filtered through an aggregate of existing 'memories'? I can't answer that, but the output of Chat GPT when asked to generate text is cliched, clunky, and internally inconsistent. A book written solely using Chat GPT responses to user 'prompts' (i.e. the questions you ask or tasks you give it) is going to need a lot of editing, even if you spend a lot of time crafting those prompts. After a month's use refining my prompts, Chat GPT still generates text that I would have been embarrassed to have produced as a 15 year old (which is saying something). It's shlocky B-movie hyperbole, the worst Hollywood has to offer. Most intriguingly, Chat GPT can't 'remember' what it's already done sometimes in the same pararaph: a lonely traveller might suddenly be accompanied, bested enemies might reappear. It also can't reproduce a book, even if it's obviously been trained with it. I asked Chat GPT to complete the sentence "In a hole in the ground there lived a..." and twice it summarised either the whole of The Hobbit or Bilbo's lifestyle, once it created something utterly new, but it didn't start spewing out Tolkien's actual text. You can find summaries of The Hobbit online already, so there is no direct copyright infringement in the sense that the AI will give you a free copy of the book.

Where I have found Chat GPT to be genuinely useful is in two areas: i) complex research questions, and ii) plotting. I'll deal with these in turn.

Research is something I really enjoy, so it's a real rabbit hole for me. Even so, despite professional training as a researcher and a lifetime's fossicking in the backwaters of Triviana, answering some questions just takes a very long time because nobody has addressed those questions directly. You might read a dozen books, scraping fragments out of each one, and then have to peer at the results for months from different angles, reading even more books on peripheral issues, to get what you want. Chat GPT is pretty good at answering even complex questions, but its database only goes up to Sep 2021, and the free version is not on the net, so it misses things. It also has that persistent problem with consistency. I asked it which metals were known in Antiquity, a question to which I know the answer, and while it was correct it gave me a list of ten metals, a very round number which I had not asked for, listing tin, lead, and copper more than once to make up to 10. Sometimes it just gets the answer wrong, or misunderstands even a very simple prompt. Chat GPT also seems keen not to offend anyone, so it steers clear of controversy, especially in religion. It's designed to be Woke-proof, with all the negatives that entails for objectivity. One great thing is that you can interrogate it further about an answer, so it's more than just a summary of Wikipedia. So B+ on that, or even A- at a pinch.

For plotting I've asked Chat GPT to come up with plots in different settings. It does a pretty good job, though it's very Hollywood in its approach to things: there is a utopian bent, happy endings, personal growth, teamwork with a band of like-minded individuals who don't hate each other, and more specifically for anything sf or fantasy related: a massive focus on McGuffins like mysterious artifacts. It's still been useful for me though, because it acts as a sounding board for ideas, and offers alternative views of the same set-up. Both of those capabilities are drivers of creativity, and several times I've come away thinking in new directions and building on my own ideas in new ways. Even writing the prompts is useful because it forces you to think in very structural terms about a plot, something that can be hard to do if you're 'in character'. Finally, I shy away from the Hollywood hyperbole, and so it's been useful to see how some of my 'tame' and non-epic ideas can be viewed in that light. Definitely an A here.

Final point: Amazon now wants indies to say whether a work is AI generated (AI made the text, you edited it) or AI assisted (er... anything else?). As I've suggested there, I think the latter term is pretty useless, and as AIs get incorporated more and more into e.g. search engines, it will be impossible to say that any work is not AI assisted in some way: is it even possible to do that now? Only if you never search the net for information.

All in all I've been reassured by AI's limitations at text generation from the perspective of copyright infringement and writers having no future, and enthused by its ability to drive creative thinking. As I said at the beginning, things are changing fast, but right now I think AI is a useful tool. One danger: asking it to do stuff gives you (or me...) a false sense of productivity and creativity. I've definitely found that the best stuff has come out of my own head after using Chat GPT, in thinking over the output and my approach to the input. We're not obsolete just yet...

The calm after the storm

Reading back to my last post on worldbuilding, behind the words I can sense the desperation I was experiencing at that time: I felt like I really needed a rope to pull me out of the morasse, and writing a list of Do's and Don'ts to myself was part of that. Worldbuilding is great, it's vital, but it's also the mother of all rabbit holes.
Since I finally got to the finishing line with Thalassa: Fire and Flood, I've been vaguely productive in a behind-the-scenes plotting and fixing kind of way, but not done much writing. That's a shame, because the writing is the bit where the magic happens, not the chopping of ingredients preparatory to the actual cooking bit, nor the teasing and tweaking and finessing during the edit phase. All three elements are enjoyable and rewarding in their own way, and I don't think they are necessarily a fixed sequence (at least, not in writing: when cooking, it's best to stick to the recipe). Even so, writing is the time when things come together.
Now at last I'm back! I've been writing around the continuing obstacles of day job + occasional post-concussion days of vertigo and brainache, and there's something on the hard-drive again. Not at all what I expected, and not what I'd been planning. But as ropes-out-of-the-morasse go, it's been good. Nearly at the end of draft 1.5 (the first half of the book is in 2nd draft phase, the second half in first, if you follow...). More as things develop.

The world(building) is not enough

I've spent a huge chunk of the last two and a bit years - when I wasn't trying to finish Thalassa: Fire and Flood or working on other projects - fiddling around with worldbuilding. It's a huge topic, and one that more than anything else to do with writing can become the deepest darkest rabbit hole. It's also become clear to me from recent reads, especially by Guy Gavriel Kay, that worldbuilding does not need to... er... cost the earth. Most works are not built on Tolkien-esque foundations (even though Tolkien borrowed a lot more than is usually realised) or sitting upon the fiction-crafting equivalent of the mass of conquered metal in the Iron Throne. You can do a lot with not very much, and it's important [note to self] not to worry too much before you start - the gaps will inevitably show themselves as you go, and you'll need to rework stuff.
On Guy Gavriel Kay: he takes the expedient of using actual historical events, giving them and the characters involved a 'quarter turn to the fantastic' as his blurb has it, and setting them in a (very) thinly disguised setting, mostly the Renaissance Mediterranean, but also further north and east, and further back in time. This is an extreme form of what many fantasy writers seem to do anyway: the setting is Mediaeval European, with hardy rustic barbarians to the north, and louche or religiously zealous aesthetes to the south. (As an aside: Edward Said's criticisms of western Orientalism could also apply to the dim, rude, and heroic lands of the North: Nordicism, perhaps?) George R.R. Martin has plundered European inspirations too, so did J. R. R. Tolkien, Joe Abercrombie, Robert E. Howard, and Richard K. Morgan, to name but my favourites. Poul Anderson wrote a great rebuff 'On Thud and Blunder' of the errors present in much fantasy literature, and also called on authors to do more outside the cliched arena of pre-Industrial Europe. The problem is, Europe is an interesting area, and while it can't claim to have the exclusive rights to varied history as inspiration, it does have a number of geo-economic features that make it an inevitable zone of (at least) three-way conflict, and no single force ever achieving lasting supremacy.
As I said, this is a long topic, and so far all I've done is state the obvious, so I'll try to make some kind of point in a list of what I think of as absolute essentials.
1) Geography is key. It determines resource availabilty, which determines social structure and politics: horse-riding nomads do not inhabit jungles.
2) A triangle of geopolitical players works best. The triad or trinity, again. For example, knights and comely maidens vs. beardy barbarians vs. desert zealots.
3) Four major historical events. Why four? A number I picked off the top of my head, but there is probably a reason: it gives each of the triad a turn at the top, with one more twist to set things up for the present.
4) A few historical figures needed, usually heroic kings or queens, to personalise the four historical events.
And that's about it as the basic framework. Starting with that, you can go places. As you go, you can fill things in, add details. In real history, details are often vague and remembered much less clearly than their fictional equivalents: if you're aiming for a sense of realism and accuracy, inaccuracy is the key. Different sides tell different stories, and those stories need not point to some single solid ultimate Truth.