Ella Hansen's Blog, page 2
June 1, 2017
Never trust the news...
...when it comes to etymology, anyway. The BBC has an article on the etymologies of several words or idioms that, it alleges, developed during the First World War. I'm habitually suspicious of such articles, and looked up the words I use. They were right on camouflage, but several others are incorrect, and quite badly so. The Oxford English Dictionary is not an infallible guide, but its citations put several of these words securely before the War:
1. "Dud," said by the BBC to have originally referred to a shell that did not explode and only later to have been expanded to other malfunctioning implements, already occurs in multiple broad usages in 1908.
2. "Binge," which they allege to be a piece of Lancashire slang spread abroad during the war, was in use in both Northamptonshire, in the mid-19th century, and Oxford, by the end of the century. Neither is near Lancashire. Worse yet, the word was already used, as a verb, by Hilaire Belloc in 1910: surely a noteworthy enough writer that we could take it as already mainstream before the War.
3. For "crummy," they give an elaborate etymology linking it to lice, which resemble crumbs. The link with "lousy" is certainly present--in 1859. If it was "coined by American infantrymen" at all, they must have been pre-Civil War regulars. One wonders if it is really an extension of "crummy" meaning "strewed with crumbs," which is already in evidence in the 18th century.
[On a side note, "crummy" was once a term of approbation for a pleasingly plump woman. Plumpness no longer gets the praise it once did, and I doubt your wife or girlfriend is going to want to hear, "Well, my dear, that dress makes you look remarkably crummy today!"]
4. "Cushy," we are told, was borrowed from Urdu; this is true enough (though the OED suggests Persian and not Hindi influence alongside Urdu), but again, the word is already cited in the 1890s. It might have been spread to the rest of the army by British Indiamen in WW1 (who knows?), but it certainly didn't enter English then.
5. The worst of all is another word of allegedly subcontinental origin. You or I might think that "chat" was related to "chatter," but no, the BBC treats us to an elaborate explanation of how it came from picking lice ("chats," in Hindi) off one's body while kibbitzing with one's fellow soldiers. The tale has the marks of an invented etymology about it--the suggestion of an exotic origin for a word of obvious etymology, the weirdly incongruous shift from literal to metaphorical meaning. And, in fact, it is completely made up: "chat" does mean "louse," but in English cant, and as early as 1699. "Chat" in various senses close to our own (though originally more negative) appears as a verb in the mid-15th century, and as a noun in More and Shakespeare!
In sum: never repeat such stories, unless you've checked them yourself. They're too often wrong. I only wonder where the BBC people got their information (no citations, of course: always a bad sign, but typical in journalism; this earlier article, in a BBC publication, was more accurate). Several of these appear in Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English , but he notes the earlier appearances of "crummy," for example, and suggest that "dud" was merely "resuscitated" from relative obsolescence during the war. He also gives the "louse" etymology for "chat," but with no hint of the Hindi connection, and no suggestion that a connection with speaking did not exist beforehand. I'm guessing an intermediary, more popular, source.
1. "Dud," said by the BBC to have originally referred to a shell that did not explode and only later to have been expanded to other malfunctioning implements, already occurs in multiple broad usages in 1908.
2. "Binge," which they allege to be a piece of Lancashire slang spread abroad during the war, was in use in both Northamptonshire, in the mid-19th century, and Oxford, by the end of the century. Neither is near Lancashire. Worse yet, the word was already used, as a verb, by Hilaire Belloc in 1910: surely a noteworthy enough writer that we could take it as already mainstream before the War.
3. For "crummy," they give an elaborate etymology linking it to lice, which resemble crumbs. The link with "lousy" is certainly present--in 1859. If it was "coined by American infantrymen" at all, they must have been pre-Civil War regulars. One wonders if it is really an extension of "crummy" meaning "strewed with crumbs," which is already in evidence in the 18th century.
[On a side note, "crummy" was once a term of approbation for a pleasingly plump woman. Plumpness no longer gets the praise it once did, and I doubt your wife or girlfriend is going to want to hear, "Well, my dear, that dress makes you look remarkably crummy today!"]
4. "Cushy," we are told, was borrowed from Urdu; this is true enough (though the OED suggests Persian and not Hindi influence alongside Urdu), but again, the word is already cited in the 1890s. It might have been spread to the rest of the army by British Indiamen in WW1 (who knows?), but it certainly didn't enter English then.
5. The worst of all is another word of allegedly subcontinental origin. You or I might think that "chat" was related to "chatter," but no, the BBC treats us to an elaborate explanation of how it came from picking lice ("chats," in Hindi) off one's body while kibbitzing with one's fellow soldiers. The tale has the marks of an invented etymology about it--the suggestion of an exotic origin for a word of obvious etymology, the weirdly incongruous shift from literal to metaphorical meaning. And, in fact, it is completely made up: "chat" does mean "louse," but in English cant, and as early as 1699. "Chat" in various senses close to our own (though originally more negative) appears as a verb in the mid-15th century, and as a noun in More and Shakespeare!
In sum: never repeat such stories, unless you've checked them yourself. They're too often wrong. I only wonder where the BBC people got their information (no citations, of course: always a bad sign, but typical in journalism; this earlier article, in a BBC publication, was more accurate). Several of these appear in Eric Partridge's A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English , but he notes the earlier appearances of "crummy," for example, and suggest that "dud" was merely "resuscitated" from relative obsolescence during the war. He also gives the "louse" etymology for "chat," but with no hint of the Hindi connection, and no suggestion that a connection with speaking did not exist beforehand. I'm guessing an intermediary, more popular, source.
May 27, 2017
No longer so, Orson?
Orson Scott Card, the author of Ender's Game, has a nice series of articles on writing based on correspondence and questions from writing classes he has occasionally taught. The newest is now over ten years old, and the advice on publishing is thus out of date, but any blog-readers who are interested in writing will still find helpful the thoughts of a successful author (and, they say, an even better teacher of writing).
One of his older posts gives me pause, however. In an essay on "rhetoric and style" from 1998, Card attacks the idea, too common (in his judgment, anyway) in creative writing programs, that an author needs to develop a distinctive, individual style. That an author will have his own style is, Card says, an inevitability, but there is no point in belaboring it; rather, the author should seek to tell the story he needs to tell. By focusing on the story itself, not on the language in which it is being told, the author will arrive at real clarity, and good style, too.
Anyone who has read overwrought, self-consciously "literary" writing will know exactly what Card means, and most will probably agree with his judgment (I certainly do). However, I wonder if Card isn't overlooking something, or rather, whether the rise of self-publishing hasn't changed the advice one might want to give.
Back in 1998, when Card wrote the article, all that lay in the future; hence, in 2000, a fascinating piece of speculation on the future of digital publishing. When Card was writing, he could take for granted his readers' basic competence at writing: they would be people who were interested in writing as an art, knew how to write decently well, and just needed good advice to improve their stories. If the self-selection of a writing class didn't guarantee that (and putting the pieces on the internet must have expanded his audience, even then), the need to have editors and (often) agents would have.
Now, it isn't so. Most self-published books probably aren't any better than they were ten or twenty years ago, but the bar to publishing them is a lot lower. You needn't spend a cent of outlay, if you don't want to; if you do want to register copyright, get a decent pre-made cover (and a few are halfways decent), and send yourself a proof copy, you might be out a hundred dollars or so, or six to seven hundred if you want a better cover. Not much, all told. You can even publish your work for free, if you like, on any number of websites--something that was already true when Card was writing the articles (he mentions it in the 2000 piece), but has become vastly more common.
The result is an enormous proliferation not just of under-edited work (not hard to find even from reputable publishers), but of positively illiterate writing, the sort of thing that has pervasively incorrect spelling, grammar, or punctuation, fails to maintain a coherent story-line, or is just plain bad. I doubt, faced with that, that one would want to dismiss Strunk and White's Elements of Style as the bane of good fiction style, or tell the would-be author simply to write his story. You have to know how to write, before you can write well, and a lot of authors don't seem to.
In a previous post, I mentioned the ancient division of style into three registers, all of which the orator would have been expected to learn. This is a very different thing from shaping an individual, idiosyncratic style, though of course orators had them (the emperor Augustus', by the report of the biographer Suetonius, would have been much to Card's liking). Card seems to be on the same track: it is rhetoric rather than style he told his students to work on; style, however, is part of rhetoric, at least for the ancients.
I wonder, therefore, whether one should now give the aspiring writer rather different advice, more consonant with the ancient approach: don't just write the story; make sure you know how to express the story you want to write, and, if you don't, work at it until you have some control over the language and can express yourself in a fashion appropriate to your subject. Strunk and White are annoying, and one hopes the writer will soon grow beyond them, but they at least give some ground-rules within which to work--something that many of the writers whose work I've read need more than anything else. Writing stories and scenes of varying lengths and content and setting might help even more; certainly my own control over my language, and the clarity of the product, have improved over time. Any way around it, one needs to be certain that technical weakness, and not just literary affectation, does not get in the way of the story being told.
One of his older posts gives me pause, however. In an essay on "rhetoric and style" from 1998, Card attacks the idea, too common (in his judgment, anyway) in creative writing programs, that an author needs to develop a distinctive, individual style. That an author will have his own style is, Card says, an inevitability, but there is no point in belaboring it; rather, the author should seek to tell the story he needs to tell. By focusing on the story itself, not on the language in which it is being told, the author will arrive at real clarity, and good style, too.
Anyone who has read overwrought, self-consciously "literary" writing will know exactly what Card means, and most will probably agree with his judgment (I certainly do). However, I wonder if Card isn't overlooking something, or rather, whether the rise of self-publishing hasn't changed the advice one might want to give.
Back in 1998, when Card wrote the article, all that lay in the future; hence, in 2000, a fascinating piece of speculation on the future of digital publishing. When Card was writing, he could take for granted his readers' basic competence at writing: they would be people who were interested in writing as an art, knew how to write decently well, and just needed good advice to improve their stories. If the self-selection of a writing class didn't guarantee that (and putting the pieces on the internet must have expanded his audience, even then), the need to have editors and (often) agents would have.
Now, it isn't so. Most self-published books probably aren't any better than they were ten or twenty years ago, but the bar to publishing them is a lot lower. You needn't spend a cent of outlay, if you don't want to; if you do want to register copyright, get a decent pre-made cover (and a few are halfways decent), and send yourself a proof copy, you might be out a hundred dollars or so, or six to seven hundred if you want a better cover. Not much, all told. You can even publish your work for free, if you like, on any number of websites--something that was already true when Card was writing the articles (he mentions it in the 2000 piece), but has become vastly more common.
The result is an enormous proliferation not just of under-edited work (not hard to find even from reputable publishers), but of positively illiterate writing, the sort of thing that has pervasively incorrect spelling, grammar, or punctuation, fails to maintain a coherent story-line, or is just plain bad. I doubt, faced with that, that one would want to dismiss Strunk and White's Elements of Style as the bane of good fiction style, or tell the would-be author simply to write his story. You have to know how to write, before you can write well, and a lot of authors don't seem to.
In a previous post, I mentioned the ancient division of style into three registers, all of which the orator would have been expected to learn. This is a very different thing from shaping an individual, idiosyncratic style, though of course orators had them (the emperor Augustus', by the report of the biographer Suetonius, would have been much to Card's liking). Card seems to be on the same track: it is rhetoric rather than style he told his students to work on; style, however, is part of rhetoric, at least for the ancients.
I wonder, therefore, whether one should now give the aspiring writer rather different advice, more consonant with the ancient approach: don't just write the story; make sure you know how to express the story you want to write, and, if you don't, work at it until you have some control over the language and can express yourself in a fashion appropriate to your subject. Strunk and White are annoying, and one hopes the writer will soon grow beyond them, but they at least give some ground-rules within which to work--something that many of the writers whose work I've read need more than anything else. Writing stories and scenes of varying lengths and content and setting might help even more; certainly my own control over my language, and the clarity of the product, have improved over time. Any way around it, one needs to be certain that technical weakness, and not just literary affectation, does not get in the way of the story being told.
May 26, 2017
Mahound is in his paradise: religion in fantasy
Mahound is in his paradise above the evening star,
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees;
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.
--G.K. Chesterton, Lepanto, second stanza
1.
A tourist visits Gondor at the end of the Third Age, on the eve of the War of the Ring. What does he see in its capital? More or less what Pippin does before Sauron's armies cross the Anduin: the black outer wall of the city, the lesser walls of its upper circles, houses and arches of white stone, a tall tower atop the central stone keel of the city, and, around the dead, white tree before it, the soldiers of the Tower Guard in their sable uniforms.
Now, imagine being a tourist in Rome during the reign of Nero. What would you see? Again, buildings of marble, arches, perhaps not soldiers (forbidden, in theory, within the city's sacred boundary). And what else? Statues, aqueducts, columns, and, scattered throughout the city, one other kind of building that Pippin does not: temples. From the grand edifices of the forum to the little shrines on the street-corners, Rome was a city full of gods in "a world full of gods." Minas Tirith is not.
The Númenorean festival is, perhaps, the closest Tolkien's fiction comes to the Christianity he embraced or to the Hebraic religion out of which it grew. It is still not very close. In the Ainulindalë, Tolkien offers a narrative meditation on good, evil, and the will of God, but his characters have no temples, no churches (not quite the same thing!), no priesthoods, no sacrifices, and few hymns or prayers. Though Middle-Earth is laden with mythology, with magic, and even with theology, it is a world with very little religion.
2.
The absence of religious ritual is a famous feature of Tolkien's works. It is also a good place to start in thinking about how a fantasy writer might (or might not) incorporate religion into his own writing. We may, in broad terms, distinguish three things to keep in mind: what "religion" is, religion as world-building, and religion as sub-creation.
The first is simple enough. Not every people has, or has had, a concept that corresponds to our "religion," and not every "religion" has the same set of features. Hinduism is not the same kind of thing as Judaism, nor Shintoism as any of the branches of Buddhism, though we, by a quirk of our own language, refer to all of them using abstract nouns ending in -ism.
Roman paganism, for example, was a set of observances, including games, public spectacles, and, above all, sacrifices, offered to the gods on behalf of the Roman people by magistrates at the advice of politicians who had been appointed to priestly boards. There was no teaching, and no congregation; the observances did not aim at personal betterment or spiritual salvation, but at preventing natural disasters, defeat in war, and other catastrophes.
This does not mean that there were no ideas about the gods. For a Roman pagan such as Varro, the most learned man of the Republic, mythology, philosophical speculation, and public worship were all branches of "theology," but they were distinct in method, accuracy, and aims. They were three different ways of thinking about or dealing with the gods that did not form a unified system.
Ancient Christianity, by contrast, was a network of assemblies ("churches") headed by local overseers ("bishops") into which people entered by an initiatory washing; it did not include sacrifices in the usual sense, and it did have theological doctrines, sacred stories, and moral teachings. Its churches prayed for the public well-being, but their main aim was the salvation, after death, of the individual members and of the Church as a whole.
Two endeavors could hardly be more different than Roman paganism and early Christianity, yet each can still be called a "religion," as each involves humans showing honor to, and communicating with, divine powers. It's this dimension that is largely lacking in Tolkien's stories--no doubt in part because of the particular relationships among Men, Elves, and the Valar, the created, quasi-divine powers who rule the world (more on this in another post)--and that I mean when I talk about "religion in fantasy."
3.
Because "religion" denotes no single set of practices or beliefs, we come swiftly to the practical question of world-building. Like invented languages such as Tolkien's own, the imagined cultures of a fantasy world are not going to have all of the features of any one real culture, but they will still (one hopes) be sketched within plausible outlines and filled out with some richness of detail. How are you, the writer, going to deal with the whole complex of practices and ideas that make up the religious side of your characters' lives, if there is one?
I mean to explore various facets of this question in more detail in the following posts. For now, let us simply observe that a fantasy religion can a. be a real-world religion in a world only somewhat different from our own, b. be explicitly modelled on a real-world religion in a world distinct from our own, or c. be invented more or less out of whole cloth, with perhaps some elements borrowed from real-world practices.
I'm not certain which of these is easier, actually. To be done well, each will have to involve some knowledge of actual religious beliefs and practices, some sympathy with those who hold to them, and a will to represent something in which a person might reasonably believe--even if the belief is nothing more than the conviction, handed down from one's ancestors, that these things are needed to keep the sun turning and the crops growing.
Otherwise, one risks producing a caricature of a real religion. Crystal dragon Christianity, the kind of fantasy construct that has churches and bishops and monks but worships a god nothing like the Christian one, is all too common. Even relatively well drawn fantasy religions don't always satisfy: take, for example, the worship of Jad in Kaye's Sarantium novels. Despite the beauty of its churches' mosaics, it lacks the vividness and power of the games and court intrigues of Sarantium. The result is a fantasy Constantinople in which the Christ analogue (himself a celestial charioteer) is less interesting than the chariot races. John Chrysostom might have been horrified, but also, one suspects, darkly amused.
4.
The defect in the Jad-cult is that it lacks the theological and historical texture of the Christianity that it imitates: its Christ is a mythical rather than a historical person, and its god is the sun, not the "Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible." It is hard to see how its doctrines could command the same devotion, and its disputes the same mortal seriousness, as Christianity.
The difference is there regardless of the truth of Christianity or any other religion, of course. All that matters, for the writing of a story, is what the characters believe and how well the story portrays it, not whether the author believes it to be true.
However, for the author who does believe in a God who is "maker of heaven and earth," an additional consideration arises. As Tolkien said, the writing of what we now call fantasy literature is an act of "sub-creation." A fantasy world does not exist unto itself; it exists within the real world, and the telling of its story is an imitation of the creation of the real world by God.
This explains why Tolkien did not, unlike his friend C.S. Lewis, portray any analogue to Jesus, and thus to Christianity, in his stories. As he himself said, "The Incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write." It is also why the angelic or divine beings that rule his fantasy Earth are themselves subordinated to an all-creating divine Father, who is associated with a mysterious live-giving principle, the Flame Imperishable, and who will someday, one of the Silmarillion-stories suggests, enter his creation to mend it. The material for Trinitarian Christianity is there, but it remains veiled.
Many Christian fantasy authors have been less circumspect than Tolkien. Lewis, of course, did not attempt to portray the Incarnation--his Aslan is not one person in two natures, Divine and leonine, but an attempt to show the character of Christ, as Christians know him, in a fairy-tale. Others have followed suit, but the result is usually flat (at least to my taste): fantasy Christianity lacks a history of revelation, a wider religious backdrop like that provided by all the ancient varieties of Judaism and of polytheism, or the sometimes brutally divisive disputes through which Christian doctrine and practice have taken shape. What one gets is either an imitation of Lewis's Aslan, or Trinitarian theology with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost switched out for invented names.
One can do better, I think, but there is no way of doing it perfectly. It is no more possible to invent a complete religion for a made-up world than it is to invent a complete language, and all the more so, if the author believes that a particular religion is actually the authoritative revelation of the God who made everything. Nevertheless, the fantasy author who believes in a transcendent God necessarily also believes that God rules over all possible worlds, as no world is possible without him. If there is any theological or religious truth in the story, it must point, however imperfectly, to the Truth--what, I believe, both Lewis and Tolkien were trying to do, in very different ways.
The author may depict all kinds of invented religions or imaginary powers in heaven or on earth; he must not create a false God.
5.
One final observation: the author need not describe a religion's beliefs and practices in complete detail. The resplendently orientalist vision of "Mahound" in paradise, which Chesterton's Lepanto opposes to the jaunty Catholicism of the men who "go gaily in the dark," is at least as effective, in its swift short-hand conjuration of a moral and religious mood, as anything I have seen in a fantasy novel.
I wonder whether the tendency toward crystal-dragonism and churchless Christianity might be helped by the simple expedient of setting the fantasy within an alternate version of our own world. In such a setting, one can much more naturally have something that is like Christianity or paganism or Islam, but not quite like it, without the temptation to introduce random names as ciphers for gods people actually worship or holidays they actually celebrate. "Soft" alternate history might be an easier genre to write in than purely invented fantasy--and indeed, one might suggest that Tolkien, at least, was writing in that genre, and that Lewis, whose Narnia shares a physical if not chronological connection with our own, was as well.
Either way, I’ve certainly not solved any of these problems. The Sign of the Sibyl involves something a bit different from either the Lewisian or the Tolkienian situation: the transportation of adherents of Christianity to a world apparently devoid of it. The premise presents theological difficulties, both for the characters and for the author. They cannot say, without presumption, why they have come thither; I cannot say, without presumption, what God would have done with another world, or a race that is not quite human.
Still less have I attempted to present a fully-drawn paganism as the religion of that world, though I have borrowed liberally from real Roman religion and still more from ancient philosophical and Christian interpretations of the religious history of the world. Nevertheless, I have had cause to think a bit about some the theoretical and practical considerations that have shaped my own writing of religion in fantasy. On these I will expand further in the posts to follow.
(Don John of Austria is going to the war.)
He moves a mighty turban on the timeless houri's knees,
His turban that is woven of the sunsets and the seas.
He shakes the peacock gardens as he rises from his ease,
And he strides among the tree-tops and is taller than the trees;
And his voice through all the garden is a thunder sent to bring
Black Azrael and Ariel and Ammon on the wing.
Giants and the Genii,
Multiplex of wing and eye,
Whose strong obedience broke the sky
When Solomon was king.
--G.K. Chesterton, Lepanto, second stanza
1.
A tourist visits Gondor at the end of the Third Age, on the eve of the War of the Ring. What does he see in its capital? More or less what Pippin does before Sauron's armies cross the Anduin: the black outer wall of the city, the lesser walls of its upper circles, houses and arches of white stone, a tall tower atop the central stone keel of the city, and, around the dead, white tree before it, the soldiers of the Tower Guard in their sable uniforms.
Now, imagine being a tourist in Rome during the reign of Nero. What would you see? Again, buildings of marble, arches, perhaps not soldiers (forbidden, in theory, within the city's sacred boundary). And what else? Statues, aqueducts, columns, and, scattered throughout the city, one other kind of building that Pippin does not: temples. From the grand edifices of the forum to the little shrines on the street-corners, Rome was a city full of gods in "a world full of gods." Minas Tirith is not.
The Númenorean festival is, perhaps, the closest Tolkien's fiction comes to the Christianity he embraced or to the Hebraic religion out of which it grew. It is still not very close. In the Ainulindalë, Tolkien offers a narrative meditation on good, evil, and the will of God, but his characters have no temples, no churches (not quite the same thing!), no priesthoods, no sacrifices, and few hymns or prayers. Though Middle-Earth is laden with mythology, with magic, and even with theology, it is a world with very little religion.
2.
The absence of religious ritual is a famous feature of Tolkien's works. It is also a good place to start in thinking about how a fantasy writer might (or might not) incorporate religion into his own writing. We may, in broad terms, distinguish three things to keep in mind: what "religion" is, religion as world-building, and religion as sub-creation.
The first is simple enough. Not every people has, or has had, a concept that corresponds to our "religion," and not every "religion" has the same set of features. Hinduism is not the same kind of thing as Judaism, nor Shintoism as any of the branches of Buddhism, though we, by a quirk of our own language, refer to all of them using abstract nouns ending in -ism.
Roman paganism, for example, was a set of observances, including games, public spectacles, and, above all, sacrifices, offered to the gods on behalf of the Roman people by magistrates at the advice of politicians who had been appointed to priestly boards. There was no teaching, and no congregation; the observances did not aim at personal betterment or spiritual salvation, but at preventing natural disasters, defeat in war, and other catastrophes.
This does not mean that there were no ideas about the gods. For a Roman pagan such as Varro, the most learned man of the Republic, mythology, philosophical speculation, and public worship were all branches of "theology," but they were distinct in method, accuracy, and aims. They were three different ways of thinking about or dealing with the gods that did not form a unified system.
Ancient Christianity, by contrast, was a network of assemblies ("churches") headed by local overseers ("bishops") into which people entered by an initiatory washing; it did not include sacrifices in the usual sense, and it did have theological doctrines, sacred stories, and moral teachings. Its churches prayed for the public well-being, but their main aim was the salvation, after death, of the individual members and of the Church as a whole.
Two endeavors could hardly be more different than Roman paganism and early Christianity, yet each can still be called a "religion," as each involves humans showing honor to, and communicating with, divine powers. It's this dimension that is largely lacking in Tolkien's stories--no doubt in part because of the particular relationships among Men, Elves, and the Valar, the created, quasi-divine powers who rule the world (more on this in another post)--and that I mean when I talk about "religion in fantasy."
3.
Because "religion" denotes no single set of practices or beliefs, we come swiftly to the practical question of world-building. Like invented languages such as Tolkien's own, the imagined cultures of a fantasy world are not going to have all of the features of any one real culture, but they will still (one hopes) be sketched within plausible outlines and filled out with some richness of detail. How are you, the writer, going to deal with the whole complex of practices and ideas that make up the religious side of your characters' lives, if there is one?
I mean to explore various facets of this question in more detail in the following posts. For now, let us simply observe that a fantasy religion can a. be a real-world religion in a world only somewhat different from our own, b. be explicitly modelled on a real-world religion in a world distinct from our own, or c. be invented more or less out of whole cloth, with perhaps some elements borrowed from real-world practices.
I'm not certain which of these is easier, actually. To be done well, each will have to involve some knowledge of actual religious beliefs and practices, some sympathy with those who hold to them, and a will to represent something in which a person might reasonably believe--even if the belief is nothing more than the conviction, handed down from one's ancestors, that these things are needed to keep the sun turning and the crops growing.
Otherwise, one risks producing a caricature of a real religion. Crystal dragon Christianity, the kind of fantasy construct that has churches and bishops and monks but worships a god nothing like the Christian one, is all too common. Even relatively well drawn fantasy religions don't always satisfy: take, for example, the worship of Jad in Kaye's Sarantium novels. Despite the beauty of its churches' mosaics, it lacks the vividness and power of the games and court intrigues of Sarantium. The result is a fantasy Constantinople in which the Christ analogue (himself a celestial charioteer) is less interesting than the chariot races. John Chrysostom might have been horrified, but also, one suspects, darkly amused.
4.
The defect in the Jad-cult is that it lacks the theological and historical texture of the Christianity that it imitates: its Christ is a mythical rather than a historical person, and its god is the sun, not the "Maker of heaven and earth, and of all things visible and invisible." It is hard to see how its doctrines could command the same devotion, and its disputes the same mortal seriousness, as Christianity.
The difference is there regardless of the truth of Christianity or any other religion, of course. All that matters, for the writing of a story, is what the characters believe and how well the story portrays it, not whether the author believes it to be true.
However, for the author who does believe in a God who is "maker of heaven and earth," an additional consideration arises. As Tolkien said, the writing of what we now call fantasy literature is an act of "sub-creation." A fantasy world does not exist unto itself; it exists within the real world, and the telling of its story is an imitation of the creation of the real world by God.
This explains why Tolkien did not, unlike his friend C.S. Lewis, portray any analogue to Jesus, and thus to Christianity, in his stories. As he himself said, "The Incarnation of God is an infinitely greater thing than anything I would dare to write." It is also why the angelic or divine beings that rule his fantasy Earth are themselves subordinated to an all-creating divine Father, who is associated with a mysterious live-giving principle, the Flame Imperishable, and who will someday, one of the Silmarillion-stories suggests, enter his creation to mend it. The material for Trinitarian Christianity is there, but it remains veiled.
Many Christian fantasy authors have been less circumspect than Tolkien. Lewis, of course, did not attempt to portray the Incarnation--his Aslan is not one person in two natures, Divine and leonine, but an attempt to show the character of Christ, as Christians know him, in a fairy-tale. Others have followed suit, but the result is usually flat (at least to my taste): fantasy Christianity lacks a history of revelation, a wider religious backdrop like that provided by all the ancient varieties of Judaism and of polytheism, or the sometimes brutally divisive disputes through which Christian doctrine and practice have taken shape. What one gets is either an imitation of Lewis's Aslan, or Trinitarian theology with the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost switched out for invented names.
One can do better, I think, but there is no way of doing it perfectly. It is no more possible to invent a complete religion for a made-up world than it is to invent a complete language, and all the more so, if the author believes that a particular religion is actually the authoritative revelation of the God who made everything. Nevertheless, the fantasy author who believes in a transcendent God necessarily also believes that God rules over all possible worlds, as no world is possible without him. If there is any theological or religious truth in the story, it must point, however imperfectly, to the Truth--what, I believe, both Lewis and Tolkien were trying to do, in very different ways.
The author may depict all kinds of invented religions or imaginary powers in heaven or on earth; he must not create a false God.
5.
One final observation: the author need not describe a religion's beliefs and practices in complete detail. The resplendently orientalist vision of "Mahound" in paradise, which Chesterton's Lepanto opposes to the jaunty Catholicism of the men who "go gaily in the dark," is at least as effective, in its swift short-hand conjuration of a moral and religious mood, as anything I have seen in a fantasy novel.
I wonder whether the tendency toward crystal-dragonism and churchless Christianity might be helped by the simple expedient of setting the fantasy within an alternate version of our own world. In such a setting, one can much more naturally have something that is like Christianity or paganism or Islam, but not quite like it, without the temptation to introduce random names as ciphers for gods people actually worship or holidays they actually celebrate. "Soft" alternate history might be an easier genre to write in than purely invented fantasy--and indeed, one might suggest that Tolkien, at least, was writing in that genre, and that Lewis, whose Narnia shares a physical if not chronological connection with our own, was as well.
Either way, I’ve certainly not solved any of these problems. The Sign of the Sibyl involves something a bit different from either the Lewisian or the Tolkienian situation: the transportation of adherents of Christianity to a world apparently devoid of it. The premise presents theological difficulties, both for the characters and for the author. They cannot say, without presumption, why they have come thither; I cannot say, without presumption, what God would have done with another world, or a race that is not quite human.
Still less have I attempted to present a fully-drawn paganism as the religion of that world, though I have borrowed liberally from real Roman religion and still more from ancient philosophical and Christian interpretations of the religious history of the world. Nevertheless, I have had cause to think a bit about some the theoretical and practical considerations that have shaped my own writing of religion in fantasy. On these I will expand further in the posts to follow.
May 24, 2017
Adventures in Self-Publishing, Part I
For me, self-publishing was an easy choice: I tend to enjoy managing lots of fiddly details. That doesn't mean, however, that the process itself is easy. Here's a smattering of things I've had to research or consider so far.
Disclaimer: I am a housewife. Information in this post comes from my own experience and (possibly flawed) understanding; if you take any action based on it, I am not responsible for the results.
Read all about US copyright law here. Writers own the copyright to their works from the moment they start writing (excluding some works for hire), but registering the copyright within three months of publication gives certain legal advantages, such as that 'statutory damages and attorney's fees will be available to the copyright owner in court actions' (PDF). Posting a manuscript to oneself (so-called 'poor man's copyright') is legally meaningless and probably not much cheaper than the $35 fee for registering a single work (e.g., a novel) online.
It's legal to register copyright under a pen name, but adding a real name to the registration (instead of the pen name or in addition to it) usually gives longer copyright protection. Even if there's a real name on the registration, the copyright notice in the book can use just the pen name. (PDF)
Cover art
At this point, professional custom covers are outside our budget. After many fruitless hours spent looking at premade covers, I decided to make them myself with free stock photos and GIMP (which I've used a lot in the past). I would not recommend this to anyone who's unfamiliar with GIMP and doesn't have a lot of time and patience for its high learning curve.
It's simplest to work with public domain or CC0 (unrestricted) images; avoid Creative Commons licences with SA ('share alike', i.e., other people can use the resulting cover in their own work) or NC ('non-commercial'). Note that images of or from public domain works (e.g., scans of old books) may not be in the public domain (although they probably ought to be, at least under U.S. law; you will probably want to sell the book in other countries, however). If one uses a photo of an identifiable person, even if one has rights to it (e.g., it's in the public domain), one may need that person's permission (a model release).
Fonts/typefaces
It's my understanding that unless one's embedding a font into an e-book (usually unnecessary), one isn't redistributing the font itself and therefore one doesn't need a commercial licence to use it in a book. I may be wrong but that makes sense to me. (Assuming one came by the typeface legally, e.g., it's built into a programme one bought, like MS Word.)
For decorative typefaces less recognisable than Papyrus or Vivaldi, try Google Fonts (all free).
Fiction disclaimers
'This is a work of fiction' etc. may not protect one from accusations of libel, but libel suits over novels are extremely rare (a living person would have to prove that it's spreading lies that damage his or her reputation). Probably up to the author's taste. I've decided to use a modified disclaimer on Safekeeping to make it clear that the setting isn't historical.
Book length and size
Agents and publishers often restrict book-length to around 100k words. Self-publishing a print book is not a good way to get around this: the longer the book, the more it costs to print it, and therefore the more expensive it has to be to make any money. By my rough calculations, a 200k-word fantasy tome through CreateSpace might have to be $14 to get non-negative royalties on Amazon.com -- and $20 for expanded distribution!
A larger trim size makes for fewer pages, but too large and the book stops looking like a novel. Having measured various books on my shelf, I think 5.5" x 8.5" is probably the maximum size for fiction.
*****
I'll keep posting in this series as I learn more useful stuff; internal layout will happen in July (the beta-readers will still have Safekeeping in June), so lots more to do then.
Disclaimer: I am a housewife. Information in this post comes from my own experience and (possibly flawed) understanding; if you take any action based on it, I am not responsible for the results.
Read all about US copyright law here. Writers own the copyright to their works from the moment they start writing (excluding some works for hire), but registering the copyright within three months of publication gives certain legal advantages, such as that 'statutory damages and attorney's fees will be available to the copyright owner in court actions' (PDF). Posting a manuscript to oneself (so-called 'poor man's copyright') is legally meaningless and probably not much cheaper than the $35 fee for registering a single work (e.g., a novel) online.
It's legal to register copyright under a pen name, but adding a real name to the registration (instead of the pen name or in addition to it) usually gives longer copyright protection. Even if there's a real name on the registration, the copyright notice in the book can use just the pen name. (PDF)
Cover art
At this point, professional custom covers are outside our budget. After many fruitless hours spent looking at premade covers, I decided to make them myself with free stock photos and GIMP (which I've used a lot in the past). I would not recommend this to anyone who's unfamiliar with GIMP and doesn't have a lot of time and patience for its high learning curve.
It's simplest to work with public domain or CC0 (unrestricted) images; avoid Creative Commons licences with SA ('share alike', i.e., other people can use the resulting cover in their own work) or NC ('non-commercial'). Note that images of or from public domain works (e.g., scans of old books) may not be in the public domain (although they probably ought to be, at least under U.S. law; you will probably want to sell the book in other countries, however). If one uses a photo of an identifiable person, even if one has rights to it (e.g., it's in the public domain), one may need that person's permission (a model release).
Fonts/typefaces
It's my understanding that unless one's embedding a font into an e-book (usually unnecessary), one isn't redistributing the font itself and therefore one doesn't need a commercial licence to use it in a book. I may be wrong but that makes sense to me. (Assuming one came by the typeface legally, e.g., it's built into a programme one bought, like MS Word.)
For decorative typefaces less recognisable than Papyrus or Vivaldi, try Google Fonts (all free).
Fiction disclaimers
'This is a work of fiction' etc. may not protect one from accusations of libel, but libel suits over novels are extremely rare (a living person would have to prove that it's spreading lies that damage his or her reputation). Probably up to the author's taste. I've decided to use a modified disclaimer on Safekeeping to make it clear that the setting isn't historical.
Book length and size
Agents and publishers often restrict book-length to around 100k words. Self-publishing a print book is not a good way to get around this: the longer the book, the more it costs to print it, and therefore the more expensive it has to be to make any money. By my rough calculations, a 200k-word fantasy tome through CreateSpace might have to be $14 to get non-negative royalties on Amazon.com -- and $20 for expanded distribution!
A larger trim size makes for fewer pages, but too large and the book stops looking like a novel. Having measured various books on my shelf, I think 5.5" x 8.5" is probably the maximum size for fiction.
*****
I'll keep posting in this series as I learn more useful stuff; internal layout will happen in July (the beta-readers will still have Safekeeping in June), so lots more to do then.
May 19, 2017
Thoughts on Alternate History VI: the limitations of a genre
1.
I've read some pretty good alternate-historical stories, rigorous, "soft," and more or less fantastic. I've often felt discontented with what I read, however, for reasons on which I've not quite been able to put my finger. I suppose I can only say that the fantastic settings and plot-devices reveal two key intellectual limitations of the genre: materialism and chronological snobbery. In what is, for now, the final post on the topic, I'll try to explain what I mean.
Again, we can never say what would have happened. Could anyone have predicted, on the basis of what we know about the Mediterranean world in, say, 50 B.C., that anything like Christianity would have arisen in a hundred years, and, if so, that it would have entirely transformed the religious mentality and practice of the Roman world in four hundred more? How about Islam, from what we know of Arabia even as late of the era of Justinian? What about the industrial revolution--as we, by shorthand, call the many interwoven technological and social changes of the long nineteenth century--a hundred years before the invention of the first useful steam-engines?
Writers of alternate history do a good job with logistics, technology, and other nuts-and-bolts practicalities (better than I might, to be sure). They tend not to grapple with the unpredictably human side of affairs, sometimes just because it is unpredictable, sometimes because (one suspects) they don't actually believe that people of other times and places were any different from themselves.
In a typical "ISOT," past peoples gleefully embrace democracy and liberalism (for just about any political or economic value of "liberalism"), and, if they don't, it's because they are benighted, self-absorbed nobles. Take Flint's 1632 as an example--and that has more reflection on the matter than most online stories I've seen! The disregard for cultural and anthropological particulars extends to the humanistic side of alternate history scenarios, too. The calibers of battleship secondary armaments matter. Latin mottoes for fictional organizations can be left to Google Translate, and too often are.
2.
I don't mean to be unfair. It's not as if writers of alternate history simply disregard human experience. I certainly have seen scenarios that speculate about how popular culture would have been changed, for example, by the occurrence of a World War III, or that show a different civil rights movement arising out of a different World War II, or indeed a few scenarios focused on aspects of popular culture. I don't think alternate-history writers are uninterested in the human side of their stories. That side simply doesn't predominate in the stories as actually told, at least on the internet. The history of which an "alternate" version is being told remains primarily technical, military, and sometimes institutional history; the wider fabric of human mentalities and cultures and experiences is largely excluded, or forgotten.
Nowhere can the tendency be seen more powerfully, as I have already hinted, than in the grand "ISOT" scenarios of the Alien Space Bats genre. With a few signal exceptions, these stories ignore the psychology not just of past peoples, but of the person transported to a foreign world. The character or characters transported become agents of technological progress, not real persons living in the past or a parallel world or (as often) in the setting of a published piece of fantasy or science fiction. How would a person transported to the Middle Ages really react to what he found there?
The question is rarely explored. The real concern, after all, is whether or not our transported protagonist will invent a superior way of refining alcohol, cause a revolution in money-making and bookkeeping, and bring on the Renaissance a few centuries ahead of schedule (and yes, I'm pretty sure I've seen that precise wording), or whether he will put his energy into making gunpowder weapons and so centralize the state or found a republic or some such.
A corollary of this focus on the technological and material is a profound vulnerability to what C.S. Lewis, following Owen Barfield, called chronological snobbery. Even in a forum that leans strongly to the political left, where one might expect more concern about the dangers of "colonialism" and so on, it's taken for granted that characters who find themselves in the past will devote all of their energies to raising the benighted persons of their newfound century to the glories of the present--usually including modern social causes as well as technology. No one ever goes to the past and finds anything about it that, lack of plumbing aside, is better than what we have now. He rarely even finds that there is anything to learn or understand, dislike it though he may.
It needn't be this way, of course. One could imagine a scenario in which the protagonist very naturally wanted to make his new present look like his old one, but eventually came to see that he could not, or that the order of his new present was not his to disturb, or that it was actually preferable, in some important ways, to modern (post-)industrial society. That might make for a good story, but it virtually never happens: the Time-Traveler's Burden remains squarely on his shoulders. The protagonist of the modern "ISOT" is Twain's Connecticut Yankee, without his loss of confidence at the end of the work, and (usually) without the challenge of past people who catch up with him.
Nor does the protagonist reflect on the theological or spiritual or even moral significance of his transportation, beyond, perhaps, a perfunctory superstition that some "purpose" must lie behind it. This, I think, is the final, and maybe the fundamental, weakness of the "ASB" conceit as a premise for a narrative. The Alien Space Bat, being an extraterrestrial being, is immensely powerful; he is not, however, God in a classically theist sense, or even a benevolently perspicacious guardian, like Homer's Athena, for the objects of his cosmic meddling. His actions are thus, as a rule, the result of simple caprice. The story occasioned by his actions can thus, at best, be a kind of existentialist attempt to overcome the empty diktat of fate or of fortune. It can never be a saga, as in Tolkienian high fantasy, of the war between good and evil, and it rarely, if ever, attains to any kind of mythic grandeur.
Maybe that is why the dream of technological progress plays so central a role in the ASB story (and often enough in its more "historical" cousins): it not only grants the story the excitement of growth and expansion, and thus its initial interest, it is also still a central part of the mythology of modern Western civilization. We may not believe in human moral progress anymore, but, by George, we all still believe in antibiotics and aeroplanes and astronauts!
3.
The objections I raise are not fatal for the genre: a lot of enjoyable reading can be found here, and that is not nothing. Light-hearted pleasure is a good deal better, in the end, than self-important profundity. Nevertheless, I hope that more will be written in the genre that shows a more, shall I say, Chestertonian imagination: one in which good and evil really do matter, and are not simply identified with present and past mores, and the protagonists transcend the limits of our own time, which as Lewis liked to say, is also a historical period. Alternate history, like detective stories, may remain light fiction, but it, too, needs its Father Brown, or, better yet, its Professor Ransom. Maybe there is one to be found somewhere. If so, I've not found him yet.
I've read some pretty good alternate-historical stories, rigorous, "soft," and more or less fantastic. I've often felt discontented with what I read, however, for reasons on which I've not quite been able to put my finger. I suppose I can only say that the fantastic settings and plot-devices reveal two key intellectual limitations of the genre: materialism and chronological snobbery. In what is, for now, the final post on the topic, I'll try to explain what I mean.
Again, we can never say what would have happened. Could anyone have predicted, on the basis of what we know about the Mediterranean world in, say, 50 B.C., that anything like Christianity would have arisen in a hundred years, and, if so, that it would have entirely transformed the religious mentality and practice of the Roman world in four hundred more? How about Islam, from what we know of Arabia even as late of the era of Justinian? What about the industrial revolution--as we, by shorthand, call the many interwoven technological and social changes of the long nineteenth century--a hundred years before the invention of the first useful steam-engines?
Writers of alternate history do a good job with logistics, technology, and other nuts-and-bolts practicalities (better than I might, to be sure). They tend not to grapple with the unpredictably human side of affairs, sometimes just because it is unpredictable, sometimes because (one suspects) they don't actually believe that people of other times and places were any different from themselves.
In a typical "ISOT," past peoples gleefully embrace democracy and liberalism (for just about any political or economic value of "liberalism"), and, if they don't, it's because they are benighted, self-absorbed nobles. Take Flint's 1632 as an example--and that has more reflection on the matter than most online stories I've seen! The disregard for cultural and anthropological particulars extends to the humanistic side of alternate history scenarios, too. The calibers of battleship secondary armaments matter. Latin mottoes for fictional organizations can be left to Google Translate, and too often are.
2.
I don't mean to be unfair. It's not as if writers of alternate history simply disregard human experience. I certainly have seen scenarios that speculate about how popular culture would have been changed, for example, by the occurrence of a World War III, or that show a different civil rights movement arising out of a different World War II, or indeed a few scenarios focused on aspects of popular culture. I don't think alternate-history writers are uninterested in the human side of their stories. That side simply doesn't predominate in the stories as actually told, at least on the internet. The history of which an "alternate" version is being told remains primarily technical, military, and sometimes institutional history; the wider fabric of human mentalities and cultures and experiences is largely excluded, or forgotten.
Nowhere can the tendency be seen more powerfully, as I have already hinted, than in the grand "ISOT" scenarios of the Alien Space Bats genre. With a few signal exceptions, these stories ignore the psychology not just of past peoples, but of the person transported to a foreign world. The character or characters transported become agents of technological progress, not real persons living in the past or a parallel world or (as often) in the setting of a published piece of fantasy or science fiction. How would a person transported to the Middle Ages really react to what he found there?
The question is rarely explored. The real concern, after all, is whether or not our transported protagonist will invent a superior way of refining alcohol, cause a revolution in money-making and bookkeeping, and bring on the Renaissance a few centuries ahead of schedule (and yes, I'm pretty sure I've seen that precise wording), or whether he will put his energy into making gunpowder weapons and so centralize the state or found a republic or some such.
A corollary of this focus on the technological and material is a profound vulnerability to what C.S. Lewis, following Owen Barfield, called chronological snobbery. Even in a forum that leans strongly to the political left, where one might expect more concern about the dangers of "colonialism" and so on, it's taken for granted that characters who find themselves in the past will devote all of their energies to raising the benighted persons of their newfound century to the glories of the present--usually including modern social causes as well as technology. No one ever goes to the past and finds anything about it that, lack of plumbing aside, is better than what we have now. He rarely even finds that there is anything to learn or understand, dislike it though he may.
It needn't be this way, of course. One could imagine a scenario in which the protagonist very naturally wanted to make his new present look like his old one, but eventually came to see that he could not, or that the order of his new present was not his to disturb, or that it was actually preferable, in some important ways, to modern (post-)industrial society. That might make for a good story, but it virtually never happens: the Time-Traveler's Burden remains squarely on his shoulders. The protagonist of the modern "ISOT" is Twain's Connecticut Yankee, without his loss of confidence at the end of the work, and (usually) without the challenge of past people who catch up with him.
Nor does the protagonist reflect on the theological or spiritual or even moral significance of his transportation, beyond, perhaps, a perfunctory superstition that some "purpose" must lie behind it. This, I think, is the final, and maybe the fundamental, weakness of the "ASB" conceit as a premise for a narrative. The Alien Space Bat, being an extraterrestrial being, is immensely powerful; he is not, however, God in a classically theist sense, or even a benevolently perspicacious guardian, like Homer's Athena, for the objects of his cosmic meddling. His actions are thus, as a rule, the result of simple caprice. The story occasioned by his actions can thus, at best, be a kind of existentialist attempt to overcome the empty diktat of fate or of fortune. It can never be a saga, as in Tolkienian high fantasy, of the war between good and evil, and it rarely, if ever, attains to any kind of mythic grandeur.
Maybe that is why the dream of technological progress plays so central a role in the ASB story (and often enough in its more "historical" cousins): it not only grants the story the excitement of growth and expansion, and thus its initial interest, it is also still a central part of the mythology of modern Western civilization. We may not believe in human moral progress anymore, but, by George, we all still believe in antibiotics and aeroplanes and astronauts!
3.
The objections I raise are not fatal for the genre: a lot of enjoyable reading can be found here, and that is not nothing. Light-hearted pleasure is a good deal better, in the end, than self-important profundity. Nevertheless, I hope that more will be written in the genre that shows a more, shall I say, Chestertonian imagination: one in which good and evil really do matter, and are not simply identified with present and past mores, and the protagonists transcend the limits of our own time, which as Lewis liked to say, is also a historical period. Alternate history, like detective stories, may remain light fiction, but it, too, needs its Father Brown, or, better yet, its Professor Ransom. Maybe there is one to be found somewhere. If so, I've not found him yet.
