Jane Lindskold's Blog, page 109

FF: Like Potato Chips

It’s very strange but, although I’ve been writing a lot, I’ve also been reading a lot.  I’m in one of those moods where as soon as I put down one book, I need to restrain myself from picking up another.

I Wonder How This Tastes?

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

The Prestige by Christopher Priest.  Audiobook.  Good detail, but I did feel that one of the major plot elements was not satisfactorily resolved, which undermined the complexity, replacing it with a sense of…  dare I say “prestidigitation”?

Reality Boy by A.S. King.  Not a “fun” book, but a very satisfying one.  A.S. King continues to rise in my already high estimation.

Night Gate by Isobelle Carmody.  This upper level middle grade novel uses the “crossing into a fantasy world from our world” in a creative fashion.  And the dogs…  And goat!

They Do It With Mirrors, Seven Dials Mystery, and The Secret of Chimneys, all by Agatha Christie.  For some reason, this week I fell into a real Agatha Christie mood.  I’m finding her novels are like potato chips, I can’t eat – make that “read” – just one.

In Progress:

Od Magic by Patricia McKillip.  Audiobook.  I’d been meaning to get to this, but kept forgetting.  Enjoying.

Maskwork by Jennifer Foreman.  Part history of the form, part project book.  Entirely fascinating.

Winter Door by Isobelle Carmody.  Just starting.

Also:

Research reading of various types.

TT: Why Cross?

JANE: So, Alan, these last couple of weeks we’ve been talking about authors who write in more than one genre.  Up to this point – other than asking Gerry Hausman how he and Roger Zelazny came to write Wilderness – we’ve mostly been speculating.

Nagle, Williams, Roberts

What do you think about asking a couple of writers why they made the choices they did?

ALAN: I think that’s an excellent idea.

JANE: Although there are many writers who work in more than one genre, I thought I could ask three I know fairly well, since they live here in New Mexico: Pati Nagle, Walter Jon Williams, and John Maddox Roberts.

Are you familiar with their works?

ALAN: I’m very familiar with Walter Jon Williams’ SF but I’ve never seen anything by him that wasn’t SF. I’ve read and greatly enjoyed John Maddox Roberts’ SPQR historical mysteries. I’ve only read one book by Pati Nagle, an excellent SF novel called Pet Noir about the adventures of Leon, a genetically modified cat. I also have a historical novel by her – it’s called Glorieta Pass. But I haven’t read it yet.

I suppose the obvious first question is, where did they all start? And what made them start there?

JANE: Let me ask them…  Hang on!

Okay.  I’m back.  I found the answers quite interesting.

Most of our readership would be most familiar with Walter Jon Williams as a writer of SF, occasionally of Fantasy, but he actually started by publishing historical novels – although this was more by chance than otherwise.

Let me put it in Walter’s own words:

“That’s kind of a complex question, because I’ve been writing since I was a child.  I wrote and submitted in practically all genres, but the first books to actually sell were historical fiction.

I didn’t set out to be a historical fiction writer, it was editors who decided that, by buying the Privateers & Gentlemen series. “

ALAN: I’ve never heard of that series. What are the books about?

JANE: They’re grand “Age of Sail,” I believe in the same time period as the Patrick O’Brien “Aubrey and Maturin” novels.  After being out of print for a long time, they’re now available as e-books.

ALAN: That’s interesting. I love “Age of Sail” novels. (Alan does a google). Ah, here we are – all the novels are available as an ebook bundle from Baen books at a very reasonable price.

Clicketty-click. Click, click.

OK – I’ve bought them

JANE:  That’s interesting.  I didn’t realize they were available there.  I’m sure they are on other platforms as well, for those who prefer them.

Now, John Maddox Roberts has also written SF/F, but he’s probably best known for his SPQR Roman mystery novels.  Indeed, he’s been interested in writing historical novels all along, but his Rome was not his first choice.

Again, he explains the start of his writing career far better than I can:

“In 1973-74 my wife, Beth, and I were living in Scotland. I’d been planning to start writing seriously, so I borrowed a typewriter from our local baker and hammered out two books over a period of several months.  The first was a straight historical novel, set during the Hundred Years’ War. It was a novel I’d been planning for some time but I was also an avid SF reader and had some ideas for a science fiction novel so I tackled that next.  When we returned to Albuquerque in early 1975 I sent the sf novel to Doubleday because I’d been told they had a new sf editor who was looking for new talent. She bought it and I decided to concentrate on sf for the next few years. I’d sold my first novel to the first publisher I submitted it to and I was also told that wasn’t supposed to happen.”

ALAN: I first came across John Maddox Roberts with the SPQR novels and I absolutely loved them. But because of that, something in my head says that he is a historical novelist and therefore I have a deep reluctance to read his SF. Clearly this makes no sense, and I’m being stupidly biased. But nevertheless…

JANE: That is a problem for writers who write in more than one genre, and one reason that so many who do use more than one name.

 Pati (who publishes as Pati Nagle, P.G. Nagle, and Patrice Greenwood) also was interested in multiple genres pretty much from the start.

As she says: “I’ve always made up stories about whatever caught my imagination, so it’s hard to identify a single genre. My first experiments in writing for publication were science fiction, followed by fantasy. My first short story sale was fantasy. My first novel sale was historical fiction.”

ALAN: It sounds like she has had a foot in every camp right from the very beginning. Good for her. How many feet has she got? (Don’t answer that!)

Could you ask them why they’ve ended up writing the kind of things that their names are (these days) most closely associated with?

JANE: I could indeed ask, but since I suspect their answers will be fulsome and thoughtful, and may lead to other questions, how about we chat about that next week?

Blank Pages

This past week, I acquired a new blank journal.  I’d filled all my others (and one spiral notebook) when working on the mysterious “handwritten piece,” which I started back in mid-October, finished in mid-January, and have been typing up, revising, and suchlike since.

Dragon of Potential

I’m up to 30,000+ words and have quite a ways to go.

But that’s neither here nor there.  As you can see from the attached picture, my new journal is very lovely .  The cover was sculpted in polymer clay by my friend (and fellow writer) Emily Mah Tippets.  It’s a solid little book, and I’m still debating what to put into it.

I don’t know how it is for most people in these days of computers, but blank paper has a lure for me that a blank computer screen does not.  It seems like the incarnation of potential, which is rather ridiculous, since realistically it’s the reverse.  After all, on a computer screen, you can immediately erase whatever you write or draw.  When you write on paper, even with a pencil, the impact is much more permanent.

I don’t keep a diary (although I do keep a record of my writing).  I keep a separate journal of what I’m reading.  And I have a handmade book in which I occasionally record random thoughts.

What would you put in a blank journal?

This week’s installment is on the shorter side because I’m nursing a sore shoulder and keyboarding puts a stress on it.

Funny thing.  Handwriting doesn’t cause me any pain at all, so, don’t worry…  I’m still writing.

FF: Not As Much As I’d Like

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

Ogapoge Does Super Cute

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

War of the Planet Burners by Dennis Herrick.  A forthcoming small press novel.

Sammy Keyes and the Search for Snake Eyes by Wendelin Van Draanen.  Middle-grade mystery.

In Progress:

The Prestige by Christopher Priest.  Audiobook.  Twisted and convoluted.

Reality Boy by A.S. King.  Just started.

Also:

Various magazine articles.

TT: Into Mystery and Elsewhere

ALAN: I’ve noticed that when SF writers do stray outside their genre, they tend to write mystery stories of some kind. Both Jack Vance and Fredric Brown wrote award-winning mystery novels.

One Author, Various Flavors

JANE: Really?  I had no idea.  What were the titles?

ALAN: Jack Vance won an Edgar award for The Man in the Cage and Fredric Brown won an Edgar for The Fabulous Clipjoint.

Indeed, you could argue that Brown was more of a mystery writer than he was an SF writer. Certainly he was much more prolific in that genre. His bibliography on Wikipedia lists twenty-four mystery novels and only five SF novels…

And Isaac Asimov wrote some rather good classical mysteries as well.

JANE: Time to go check my bookshelves and see if I have either of those first two.

I’ve heard that about Asimov and I’ve read his Murder at the ABA.  In 1975, when the book is set, the ABA was the largest convention for booksellers – and consequently attracted a lot of book publishers and writers as well.  It still exists in a slightly different form as the BEA.

Anyhow, if you can get beyond the singularly most annoying first person narrator I’ve encountered in a long while, it’s not a bad mystery.

ALAN: It’s been years since I read it, so I don’t remember that. I just remember enjoying the mystery.

JANE: Above you said: “I’ve noticed that when SF writers do stray outside their genre, they tend to write mystery stories of some kind.”

To me this is fairly reasonable, since even when a story isn’t an obvious “whodunit,” much SF has a similar problem-solving ethic.

ALAN: I completely agree about the problem-solving ethic. That overlap is probably the reason why so many SF fans are also mystery fans. And vice-versa, of course.

In the UK, the genre boundaries have always tended to be a little more blurred than they are in America. H. G. Wells wrote across the spectrum and perhaps British writers have taken their inspiration from him.

Brian Aldiss has written several well-regarded mainstream literary novels. The Horatio Stubbs trilogy is particularly good in its depiction of youth caught up in war. And as a bonus, the first volume of the trilogy (The Hand Reared Boy) is the best novel about masturbation since Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint!

JANE: This last is a recommendation??? After I read Graham Joyce’s The Tooth Fairy, I felt grotty for weeks!

ALAN: Of course it’s a recommendation. The book will keep the average teenage boy enthralled and occupied for ages!

I also think you can make a good case for the majority of Christopher Priest’s books being SF-related mainstream novels as well, if that makes any sense. The Separation, for example, is set very firmly in the Second World War. They even made a movie from his novel The Prestige. It’s about feuding stage magicians…

JANE: I’ve heard about The Prestige, though I haven’t read it or seen the film.  I’ve always meant to, since David Bowie played Tesla in it…

ALAN: Priest’s contemporary, J. G. Ballard cut his literary teeth in the SF world, but he soon left it far behind. I’m particularly fond of his semi-autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun about life in Shanghai under Japanese rule in the 1940s.

I don’t know if James Blish absorbed some of that influence or not, but around about the time he moved permanently to England, he wrote a stunningly brilliant historical novel (Dr. Mirabilis) about the life of Roger Bacon.

JANE: That last one sounds interesting.  I’ve always been interested in Roger Bacon.

Certainly, there are American writers who have done/are doing the same.  In fact, one could argue that there is a subset of “literary” writers who write SF/F, but because they were/are embraced by the literary community, they often get praised for doing what’s old hat in our field.  A few examples…

Margaret Atwood regularly writes what is basically SF/F, but (so I’ve heard) doesn’t think she is doing so.

Michael Chabon’s Summerland was delightful, but certainly contained no surprises in terms of the material he used (a blending of myths, legends, and contemporary material) for anyone familiar with the works of Charles deLint, Neil Gaiman,  Roger Zelazny, or, if I dare say so, Jane Lindskold.

Norman Mailer’s Harlot’s Ghost was published as mainstream fiction, but…  Well, look at the title!

Some SF/F writers find this annoying.  Maybe because I realize how under-read in genre fiction most “literary” critics (who often have academic backgrounds) are, I just sigh.

ALAN: Similarly, in Britain we have Doris Lessing, a Nobel Prize winning writer whose Canopus in Argos: Archives sequence are pure SF novels. I never liked them much, but they have their admirers. John Clute is particularly fond of them.

Lessing herself was an avowed SF fan. I used to see her sometimes in the SF bookshops of London, browsing the shelves and buying armfuls of lurid paperbacks, just like I was doing. She was a guest of honour at the Worldcon in 1987.

JANE: So it sounds as if Doris Lessing, bless her, wouldn’t mind being called an SF writer as well as a literary one.  How refreshing!  Someone who recognizes that it’s not an either/or sort of thing.

ALAN: She was proud of her SF work, and very happy to be thought of as an SF writer. Similarly, there is an up and coming British writer called David Mitchell who is winning lots of mainstream plaudits for novels such as The Cloud Atlas. Like Lessing before him, he seems to be quite impatient with genre boundaries and is more than happy to admit the influence of SF on his work.

Kingsley Amis was also a big SF fan. He published a very perceptive critical examination of the genre (New Maps of Hell) and in the 1960s, with Robert Conquest, he edited the Spectrum series of SF anthologies. He wrote several extremely good SF novels as well. The Alteration is an alternate history in which the Reformation never happened and the Catholic Church continues to dominate world affairs. Russian Hide and Seek is set in a future England that is a subject nation of the USSR. But my favourite is The Anti-Death League, a very odd novel indeed – conspiracy theorists will love it!

JANE: I’ve read – and enjoyed – New Maps of Hell.  Oddly enough, although I really liked Amis’s Lucky Jim, I don’t think I’ve read any of the titles you mentioned above.  Clearly I need to give some a try.  I think that both The Alteration and The Anti-Death League sound interesting.

I’m assembling quite a list!

I also have an idea for next time…   Here in New Mexico, we have quite a few writers who have been successful in more than one genre.  Why don’t we ask them why they’ve branched out?

Action Figures!

Do you like action figures?  Collect them?  Did you play with them as a kid?  If so, what sort appeals to you?

Getting into the Action

Lately, there’s been a lot of talk about action figures…  And that’s gotten me thinking about action figures and their connection to stories.

 Although I know some purists will differ, for the purposes of today’s Wander, I’m going to include figures that some might call “dolls” in the discussion.   Since, according to Wikipedia, the term “action figure” was first coined by Hasbro for their G.I. Joe line, and the early G.I. Joes were clearly dolls, just dolls meant for boys rather than girls, I think I’m on safe ground.  And, of course, figures of this sort pre-date Hasbro coining the term.  “Tin soldiers” filled the need long before plastics came along.  They were followed by any number of rubber and plastic figures.

As I see it, there are three general classes into which action figures fall: figures that are essentially illustrations of a specific character from comics, television, or movies; figures with some story, and figures without a backstory .

Dolls tied to specific television and movie characters go back a long way.  Their shapes have changed along with affordable materials, until today you may purchase a highly poseable representation of the character of your choice, complete with characteristic equipment.  Although still marketed to children, many adults collect these as well.  Indeed, there is a sub-market of high-priced figures meant for adults.

When I asked on Twitter why people collect action figures, Jas. Marshall replied: “As a talisman w/the traits of the character. Ex: I have a River Song figure from the ep where she made a Dalek beg for mercy.”

Jas. Marshall is in good company here.  The attachment to figures of potent characters as talismans probably began back in prehistory.  Often these would have been figures of gods or demigods but if, as Christopher Knowles persuasively argues in his book of the same title “our gods wear spandex,” then these action figures are part of a venerable tradition.

Figures with some story have also been around for a long time.  Barbie started out as a fashion doll, basically, a miniature model which girls could costume as they chose.  However, over time, Barbie acquired a sister (Skipper), a boyfriend (Ken), and various friends.  Even when I was a girl (a long, long time ago) there were books telling about their interactions.  These stories weren’t very detailed.  The one I remember had to do with what Barbie was going to wear to a picnic; the kicker was that after spending page after page trying on different outfits, Barbie arrives at the picnic to find that everyone is wearing the same dress.  Nonetheless, these slim books did give a sense of potential stories involving Barbie and her friends.

Today, of course, Barbie has moved into the class of figure with a full and detailed backstory, which is presented in movies, books, and comics.  She has a great deal of company in this.

One of the most fascinating evolutions related to action figures and story is the “Ever After High” line of dolls/action figures.  These dolls are supposed to be the descendants of various fairytale characters.  Some are happy to follow the tradition set by their parents.  Others want to break the mold and make their own stories.

Author Shannon Hale tells on her website how she (an already established author of YA and middle grade fiction) was approached to write the backstories for these characters, up to and including novels.  What’s fascinating about this to me is that these were dolls that hadn’t yet been released.  Other than alluding to traditional fairytales, they were not tie-ins to any existing story.  However, having a story in place was clearly meant to make them more compelling.

That’s rather cool.  I plan to read the first book in the series, because I want to find out more.

Providing a toy with a backstory is not unique, certainly.  However, a more common mechanism for getting the story out has been a cartoon series (Jem; He-Man and the Masters of the Universe) as the marketing tool of choice, not the old-fashioned, so often maligned book.

However, despite the mechanism being in place for promoting action figures as part of an existing story, there are plenty of figures that are provided with only the thinnest of stories: sometimes only a name and a few lines of text.  Some of the figures in today’s picture fall into that category.  The animal-warrior figures are from Papo and are listed in their catalog simply as “Mutant Lion” and “Mutant Tiger.”  Who mutated them, why they were mutated, and whether they are unique or part of a larger culture is left to the imagination of the owner.

The producers of the I Am Elemental figures go out of their way not to provide a backstory for their characters, even though in other ways these masked figures greatly resemble higher-end superhero action figures (which are usually tied to some comic franchise or other).  I Am Elemental’s website makes clear they are prompting a “play experience where girls are the creators of their own stories.”

Obviously, I have action figures, including the ones in the illustration.  Although I don’t have any that I’ve purchased because of their association with a favorite series or movie, I do own a couple.  For example, I have a blue-haired anime figure that Jim bought me, not because she was the heroine of Sakura Wars (which I’ve never seen), but because, at that time, the character I was playing in a friend’s RPG happened to have blue hair.   So, my figure is named Yunome Ame, not Sakura.

And, believe me, if I saw the right figure from a favorite show, I wouldn’t hesitate to join Jas. Marshall in giving it shelf-space as a talisman.

That said, most of my figures have been purchased because of a sense that there’s a story there.  In some cases, the story has been written.  The pale-featured young woman on the horse in today’s illustration would become Blackrose in my short story “Hunting the Unicorn.”  A certain two-headed dragon given as a gift by a college friend would become Betwixt and Between in my first published novel Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls.

I rather like to think that someday I’ll find the right story to go with the Mutant Tiger and Mutant Lion.

So… Do you like action figures?  Collect them?  Did you play with them as a kid?  If so, what sort appeals to you?  Have any of them ever given you a story?

FF: As Worlds Evolve

This week I continued several series, which made me think some about the form.

Kel Does Her Supermodel Thing

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Seeds of Rebellion (Beyonders 2) by Brandon Mull.  Suffers from “middle book of a trilogy” syndrome.  Additionally, inclusion of a larger number of adult characters mean that our teen protagonists begin to seem like “extras.”  Given the number of times both Rachel and Jason muse if they’ve fulfilled the role for which they were summoned to this fantasy world, I wonder if the author was subconsciously wondering the same thing.

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.  Audiobook.  Enjoyed all over again.

Kitty’s Big Trouble by Carrie Vaughn.  Audiobook.  Despite the title, much less dramatic than the last couple in the series.  Chinese material expanded the “universe.”  The inclusion of film as inspiration/source material appropriate for this series, which (like much of the “paranormal urban fantasy” sub-genre) seems more based out of movies than folklore.

In Progress:

The Prestige by Christopher Priest.  Audiobook.  Just started.

War of the Planet Burners by Dennis Herrick.  A forthcoming small press novel.

Also:

Quite a bit of scattered short material.

TT: Crossing the Border

ALAN: We were talking about writing outside of your genre comfort zone. I remember being very impressed with your novel The Buried Pyramid. The fantasy elements don’t kick in until about half way through the book, and the first half is a grittily real bit of historical scene-setting. It seems to me that the book could easily have grown up to be a proper historical novel if you’d decided to take it that way. Have you ever considered writing non-SF/F novels?

In and Out of Genre

JANE: Not really.  I guess I have a weird brain, but what interests me are stories that incorporate “speculative” aspects as part of the normal world – much as I do in The Buried Pyramid.  It just seems more natural.

ALAN: I’m not sure I really understand what you mean by that. Can you give me an example?

JANE: Well, to the ancient Egyptians, their gods were part of their day-to-day existence, not reserved for “temple” or whatever.  So, it seemed natural to me that at some point in the course of the events detailed in The Buried Pyramid the gods would decide to join in.

Another good example are my short stories with Prudence Bledsloe.  The stories are historically accurate to the post-Civil War American West – the so-called “Wild West.”  For the story I finished a few weeks ago – “Choice of Weapons” – I spent a huge amount of time checking historical dates to make certain that the elements I wanted would have been possible within the historical context.

However, Prudence is a werewolf.  I was actually surprised when a friend mentioned that her husband considered this an odd thing.  To me it’s completely natural.

ALAN: Me, too, in the sense that it doesn’t take me by surprise when something like that happens. I suspect most SF fans would feel the same way. It’s a sure sign of a misspent youth – being indoctrinated with the SF/F point of view on the way the world works in your formative reading years often means that you start to expect this kind of thing to happen. Indeed, there can be a vague feeling of disappointment when you read stories in other genres and there aren’t any werewolves (or whatever) in them.

JANE: I agree!  What’s odd is that my friend’s husband does read SF.  He’s a big fan of Neil Stephenson, who I think you also like.

ALAN: True – but I think Stephenson’s best novels (Crypotonomicon and The Baroque Cycle for example) are the ones that are closer to historical fiction than they are to science fiction. Which is what this tangent is all about, of course!

JANE: Funny, I’d never thought of it that way, but Cryptonomicon is definitely historical fiction with a twist.

Anyhow, to continue answering your question, if I’m writing science fiction, I prefer to include aliens or other weirdness.  I’m not interested in a potential future that is just more of us doing more of the same things except somewhere else.

I have written a couple of non-SF/F short stories, though.

ALAN: What? Proper stories? No SF/F elements at all? Tell me about them.

JANE: Both came about because of invitations to write for theme anthologies.   Oddly, both were published in 2001.  Some fifteen years later, I really can’t remember which I wrote first.

One was for an anthology of murder mystery stories edited by Anne Perry, with the assistance of John Helfers of Tekno Books.  For those who don’t remember, Tekno Books was the company run by Martin H. Greenberg and which, whether acknowledged on the book or not, probably had something to do the majority of anthologies published in the 1980’s (when I started being aware of publishers; Marty was working in the field even earlier) through 2011 when he died of cancer.

I mention this because I never had any contact with Anne Perry, only with John.

ALAN: You know I’ve always found it ironic that Anne Perry, who is a convicted murderer, makes her living writing murder mysteries. Of course, you could say that she is obeying the dictum to “write what you know,” so actually it isn’t ironic at all!

JANE:  Ouch!  Anyhow, I can’t remember if John contacted me by e-mail or phone, but I think it was phone because I recall an exchange something like this.

JOHN: Jane, I know you usually write SF/F, but would you like to do a straight mystery story?

JANE: Absolutely!  I love mysteries.  Other than SF/F, it’s probably the genre I read the most.

JOHN: Well, this is for a theme anthology where all the mysteries need to be somehow tied to the horoscope.  Knowing how you love myth and folklore and such, I thought it would be right up your alley.

JANE: That does sound cool, but you must be getting a lot of serial killer stories.

JOHN: (long pause)  No, I don’t think we have any.

JANE: Okay!  I’ll do one.

And I did.  It was called “Slaying the Serpent,” and appeared in Death by Horoscope.  I did a lot of research not only into the horoscope, but into forensics, profiling, and typical serial killer behavior…  At least of the more flamboyant type.

ALAN: Why on Earth (or off it) did you immediately think of serial killers? Is that your secret superpower?

JANE: Oh, there was a notorious serial killer who was dubbed “The Zodiac Killer.”  He was active in the  1960’s and 1970’s, I believe.  Seemed perfectly logical to me that everyone would recall him.

The other “proper” story  I wrote was a historical, for a collection of Civil War spy stories edited by Ed Gorman, titled The Blue and Gray Undercover.  I’d lived in Virginia for about five years and wanted to set my story in terrain I knew well.

A man named Jed Hotchkiss quickly caught my fancy.  He was a cartographer, the first person to map the Shenandoah Valley in Virginia.  His maps were considered key to Confederate victories in that area, especially that of Stonewall Jackson at Stony Creek.

Obviously, in wartime, a cartographer can’t work openly, so Hotchkiss and his associates qualified as spies.  The techniques they used to cover that they were actually collecting data were fascinating.

ALAN: Robert Baden-Powell, the founder of the Boy Scout movement, made maps of enemy fortifications and highlighted the positions of their heavy artillery. He concealed the maps in sketches of butterflies; the maps were presented as elaborate markings on their wings…

JANE: Oh!  That’s really cool.  I had no idea!

Suffice to say, I really enjoyed both the historical research and then finding a way to tell a story that would be more heart-gripping than a mere info dump.  The story is called “The Road to Stony Creek,” by the way.

ALAN: I wonder how other writers feel about this kind of thing? Let’s explore it more next time.

Art Reacting to Art

Recently, I was asked “What inspires you?”   Although the question could have been intended in a more general sense, I immediately thought about it in terms of writing, since writing is one of my central passions.

On-going Discussion

As those of you who have read my Wanderings on Writing and my afterpieces to the stories in my collection Curiosities already know, I find inspiration in a lot of places.  However, this question ended up muddling together with my thoughts on the original Star Wars movie (aka “A New Hope”) and thereby inspired today’s wander.

Neither Jim nor I had watched Star Wars for at least twenty-five years.  (We arrived at this estimate because we’ve been together for twenty and had never watched it together.)  Back in January, we went to see “The Force Awakens” with our friend Michael Wester.  Following that, we decided that we really should re-watch the film that created the phenomenon.  This past weekend, we finally got around to doing so.

While we thought that “Star Wars” held up quite well (both to our memories and to its place in cinema history), especially after seeing “The Force Awakens,” we were stuck by two things that neither of us had really considered when (at ages twenty-five and fifteen respectively) we had seen the original film.  One, how uniformly white (unless alien or robotic) the Star Wars future was.  Two, how very few females there were in it.

Especially given that classic Star Trek had already created a future in which both women and people of varied ethnic backgrounds were clearly visible, this stuck us as a big step backwards.  I was further struck that – especially since so many people praise Princess Leia as a landmark female character, capable of taking action even while filling the role of the central element in the “rescue the princess” motif – no one seems to have noticed Leia was also the only human female character in the film.  (I’m deliberately omitting Luke’s aunt, since a couple lines and dying off-stage does not a character make.  That’s hardly better than an extra.)

Did this bother me at the time?  Heck, no!  I was fifteen.  If there were any characters I wanted to be, they would have been Han Solo or Chewbacca, not Luke or Leia.

But as I was musing about this, it blended with the question I’d been asked about inspiration, which led me in turn to think about how much writing is done as a reaction to some other work of art (in which I most sincerely include movies, television, and the like).

Reactive inspiration comes in many forms.  For purposes of this wander, I’ll divide them into the general, the desire to fill in the blanks, and, lastly,  those stories that are written in reaction to being angered or offended by an element in another work.  These elements of reactive inspiration are not, by any means, completely isolated from each other.

General reactive inspiration is the most simple.   Sometimes it comes from a negative reaction to another piece as in, “I could do as good a job as that!  If he/she can get published, then why can’t I?”  The positive variation on this is, “I love what X writes, so I want to write it, too.”

Fill in the blanks is another form of reaction.  A good example is Neil Gaiman’s story “The Case of Death and Honey” reprinted in his recent collection Trigger Warnings.  Although on one level Gaiman’s story is part of the almost too vast canon of fiction written using Sherlock Holmes, it distinguishes itself by not just providing another gas-lit adventure, but by seeking to supply a reason why Sherlock Holmes took up beekeeping in his retirement.

Fill in the blanks is also, of course, the source of a huge amount of fan fiction, a topic I have dealt with elsewhere and so won’t repeat here.

My initial contact with Roger Zelazny grew (in part) out of a reaction that he had really missed a lot of potential story regarding the three princesses of Amber (as opposed to the nine princes) and a desire to fill in the blanks.

However, although both general and fill-in-the-blanks are certainly valid examples of reactive inspiration, a much more interesting form of writing can occur when Author B has a strong reaction to some element in a piece by Author A.

A good example is how Joe Haldeman wrote The Forever War as a reaction to Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers.   In this case, the field benefited by acquiring not one but two stories dealing with a similar theme – but from widely different perspectives.

I once heard Vonda McIntyre discuss how her Nebula award-winning novel The Moon and the Sun came from her reaction to the ending of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast.

When I was talking about this subject with a friend, he mentioned reading in an interview in Amazing magazine how Ted White wrote his novel By Furies Possessed in reaction to the classic Star Trek episode “This Side of Paradise.”

I’ve often wondered if the “Chani” of C.J. Cherryh’s Pride of Chanur and sequels were written as a direct response to Larry Niven’s Kzinti from his “Known Space.”  If they weren’t, it’s an amazing example of zeitgeist in action.

Sometimes the reaction is more generalized.  For example, if I’d been thirty, not fifteen, when I first saw Star Wars, I likely would have reacted by writing fiction that explained where the rest of the women were in this future – and along the way providing a lot more cultural and ethnic diversity.  Also, Chewbacca would have gotten a medal along with Han and Luke.  (Even at fifteen, I was seriously bothered that he was left out, since he took all the same risks as those two humans.)

Although I wasn’t there to do that, other writers took up the challenge, so that the question today is not “Why Rey?” but “Why hasn’t Hasbro failed to produce Rey action figures?”  Sometimes reactive fiction really can change the world.

Of course fiction can be (and much SF/F is) written in reaction to larger social, political, or scientific trends (or perceived trends), but that’s a whole ‘nuther source of inspiration.

At its richest, reactive inspiration can lead to a complex exploration of a topic, an expansion of what is seen as possible, to the point that the once all-white, nearly all male “Star Wars” universe has made great strides in envisioning a more complex future tapestry both in terms of gender and race.  (There are still some white hat/black hat problems, but I’ll spare you that…)

At its worst, reactive inspiration becomes a reductive element, creating smaller and smaller communities, none of which will work with, much less acknowledge, the other.

I know where I’d like to be…  How about you?

(Thanks to Ruth Stone, who asked the question.  I hope she enjoys this reply.)

FF: Assorted Flavors

This week has mingled older and newer works.

For those of you just discovering this feature, the Friday Fragments lists what I’ve read over the past week.  Most of the time I don’t include details of either short fiction (unless part of a book-length collection) or magazine articles.

Persephone Poses

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.  If you’re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive recommendation list, you can look on my website under Neat Stuff.

Once again, this is not a book review column.  It’s just a list with, maybe, a bit of description or a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Going Bovine by Libba Bray.  Audiobook.  Very different from her “Diviners” novels, but an interesting read.

Murder at the ABA by Isaac Asimov.  Pretty good mystery.  Fascinating time capsule look at publishing in 1975.  How much has changed…  How much has not!

Newt’s Emerald by Garth Nix.  Audiobook.  Lighter than much of his stuff, Regency romance crossed with a good adventure.  Shows a fondness for both.

Trigger Warning by Neil Gaiman.  Short story collection.  Varied and interesting stories..

In Progress:

The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle.  Audiobook.  I’ve read these before, but a revisit has been amusing.  I’d forgotten how well Doyle did setting.

Seeds of Rebellion (Beyonders #2) by Brandon Mull.  jJust started.

Also:

Not much!