Jane Lindskold's Blog, page 123

FF: Making Choices

This week, choices ��� especially on how to live ��� seems to be a theme.

Just in case you don���t know��� The Friday Fragments feature lists of what I���ve read over the past week. ��Most of the time I don���t include either short fiction or magazine articles.

Awash in Options

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.�� If you���re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive 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 few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Deep Secrets by Diana Wynne Jones.�� The parts set at the SF convention were fun, but what made this novel work for me were how the various characters thought they knew exactly who they were, where they were going and why.�� Yet, by the end, most of them had changed radically.

CryoBurn by Lois McMaster Bujold.�� Audiobook.�� A good mixture of SF speculation and intrigue, salted with humor.�� Is life just about avoiding dying?�� And how much life would be ���enough���?�� Speculation on these and related points gives the novel nice depth.

The Sculptor by Scott McCloud.�� Graphic novel.�� Talented sculptor David Smith wants to be more than just another ���David Smith.����� Haunted by his family���s history of unrealized potential, he fights so hard to keep from being a failure that he����� Well, read it yourself and see what you think!

In Progress:

Sammy Keyes and the Skeleton Man by Wendelin Van Draanen.�� Mystery interwoven with over-the-top junior high politics.

The Pinhoe Egg by Diana Wynne Jones.�� Audiobook.�� The Pinhoes have kept a secret for a long time.�� Can they keep it hidden from Chrestomanci?

Also:

Beginning research for a future project.

TT: The Mistress of Mixy Magicks

JANE: Any discussion of Diana Wynne Jones��� work would not be complete without a mention of her ���Chrestomanci��� books.�� I hesitate to call them a ���series,��� since the term implies events occurring in order and these most certainly do not. Or they do, sort of����� I mean, Charmed�� Life is usually listed as the first of the ���Chrestomanci��� novels, but as I see it both The Lives of Christopher Chant and Conrad���s Fate would come first, chronologically.

Dark Lord Approved!

ALAN: Well, the stories do take place in parallel universes, which would explain why the ���events��� take place ���out of order,��� as it were. It’s actually quite hard to arrange the books chronologically ��� there are always things that seem not to fit. Consequently my preference is to read the books in the order that they were published. After all, that’s the order in which Diana Wynne Jones first encountered the material, and what could be more definitive than that?

JANE:�� That���s as good a solution as any!

One thing I like about the ���Chrestomanci��� books is that often the Chrestomanci is a very minor character.�� Just because there is someone whose job it is to police the uses and abuses of magic does not mean that the main characters are not important.�� Far from it.�� For this reason, I really like both Witch Week and The Magicians of Caprona.

ALAN: Most of Diana Wynne Jones’ books stand alone, though occasionally she did write a sequel to some of her stories. There are two ���Magid��� novels, for example: Deep Secret and The Merlin Conspiracy. So the seven books that make up the Chrestomanci series are therefore a little untypical of her work.

She did write one other extended series. The four novels known as the Dalemark Quartet are the closest things she ever wrote to a standard fantasy story. Because they are so close to the mainstream of fantasy, of necessity they lack the quirkiness and humour that was her trademark. Probably because of this, I’ve never liked them very much.

JANE: Perhaps because I���ve never expected Diana Wynne Jones to just be a quirky writer, I had no problem at all with the Dalemark Quartet.�� I also don���t have your resistance to ���standard fantasy,��� although I do insist that it be both well-written and non-formulaic.

And I really feel the Dalemark Quartet is worth reading.�� The characters come from a wide variety of backgrounds and the problems they face are complex ��� well beyond the usual clich��d beat the Great Evil Lord of Darkness gakk that you rightly have termed EFP (Extruded Fantasy Product).

Therefore, I���ll go counter to you and recommend the Dalemark Quartet to anyone who doesn���t start out with a bias against Fantasy or a desire to limit the author to one sort of book.

ALAN: Oh I agree! They are certainly complex and clever novels, but they just aren’t my particular cup of tea.

JANE: Although I really liked the Dalemark Quartet, I strongly believe that Diana Wynne Jones herself shared your dislike of EFP.�� Certainly, her novel The Darklord of Derkholm takes every single trope of that sort of fantasy to task.�� Have you read it?

ALAN: Oh indeed I have!

The story is set in a fantasy world that is dominated by its tourist industry. Mr. Chesney’s Pilgrim Parties arranges annual tours from our world to the fantasy world and the tourists expect to see all the fantasy clich��s on their holiday ��� a dark lord, wise wizards, and so on. Everybody always puts on a good show for the tourists and the tourists always leave quite satisfied with their experiences. But the effect can be quite devastating on the people who live in the fantasy world.

In order to give the tourists an authentic experience, farmlands are laid to waste, and people are killed. Querida, the head of the Wizard’s college, wants to put an end to the tours and so she attempts to sabotage the next one by backing an incompetent wizard called Derk to be the next Dark Lord. Derk’s son Blade will be the Wizard Guide for the tour. Hopefully everything will then unravel and fall apart and the tourists will be less inclined to return…

It’s a cunning plan. What could possibly go wrong? Well, quite a lot actually…

JANE: Again, what saves this from being simply a snarky attack fantasy fiction clich��s is that Diana Wynne Jones makes her characters very three-dimensional.�� Derk is an excellent wizard, in many ways, but Querida is right.�� He���d make a terrible Dark Lord.�� Querida makes matters worse by creating a rift between Derk and his wife (who is also a wizard).

I don���t want to provide spoilers, but one of Diana Wynne Jones���s greatest talents is the passing comment that makes even the most outrageous fantasy world real.�� In this case, it���s a comment that wizards have a very high rate of divorce.

Suddenly, the problems between Derk and his wife seem all too real and divorce all too possible.

ALAN: Yes ��� it’s these little human touches that anchor her stories in reality and make the world feel lived in, no matter how bizarre it may appear to our mundane point of view.

I have always considered The Dark Lord of Derkholm to be the fictional counterpoint to Jones��� delightfully barbed The Tough Guide To Fantasyland. This is a travel guide to a standard fantasy landscape. In a series of short satirical definitions arranged in an authoritative A-Z , she describes all the obligatory facets of a fantasy adventure.

For example there will be STEW which will be thick and savoury (i.e. viscous and dark brown). There will be BEER which foams and is invariably delivered in tankards. It will be bought at an INN which will be made mostly of wood and which will be larger upstairs than downstairs. Downstairs, there is room only for a taproom and bar (and maybe a kitchen where STEW will be cooked). Upstairs there are innumerable sleeping chambers (not bedrooms) arranged along never-ending corridors so that people can creep through them and break in to search luggage or threaten the occupants with DAGGERS.

It should be noted that despite living entirely on STEW (which never seems to contain fresh vegetables and which is never, ever served with a side salad), no fantasy characters ever suffer from SCURVY or any other deficiency diseases…

JANE: I love the Tough Guide.�� In fact, I regularly recommend it to new writers of fantasy fiction as a check against falling into ill thought-out world-building.�� You cite the entry on stew, but seem to miss what a great writing lesson it involves.�� I quote:

���Stew seems an odd choice as staple food, since, on rough calculation, it takes forty times as long to prepare as steak.���

And, yes, stew does seem like an odd choice for a staple food, but since it also can, well, ���stew��� for a long time, stew makes perfect sense for a low-budget dish in an inn or tavern, because a pot can be kept warm on the hob and served up quickly to newly arriving guests.�� However, it���s a lousy choice when camping out, yet many writers don���t make the distinction.

ALAN: Perhaps the writers have never tried to cook anything over a camp fire.

JANE: Oh��� yes!�� Good point.�� There���s something to be said for building upon actual experience.

Another great entry for the prospective world-builder is the one on embroidery.

Again, I quote:�� ���A lot of it is beautiful, and there is so much of it that there must be the equivalent of factories devoted to making it����� The only people the Tourist will actually see engaged in Embroidery will be ladies of high birth.�� And they can���t do all of it.�� Can they?���

ALAN: The definitions are trite in themselves but taken together they amount to a devastating destruction of the fantasy clich��, and if you have ever read any of those horrible novels, you will laugh in delighted recognition at her witticisms and truisms. And, as an added bonus, you will know exactly how not to write a fantasy novel.

JANE: I firmly agree!�� One can write in the context of a tradition ��� such as High Fantasy ��� without falling into the worst errors.

I keep thinking of things I want to add, but reality is knocking at my door, in the form of reminders that I really DO need to get some fiction writing of my own done.�� Shall we continue next time?

Twenty-one Tomato Salute

On Saturday, Jim and I planted twenty-one tomato seeds.�� Our goal is to have twelve plants bearing tomatoes by the end of the summer.�� We���ll be happy with six, especially if five of them are romas, because romas are good both for eating fresh and for cooking.

Tomatoes: Getting Started

Later that day, it occurred to me that once again gardening had provided a very good metaphor for writing.

Tomatoes are to Seeds as Stories are to _______.

If you filled in the blank with ���Ideas,��� you can pat yourself on the back. ����Every writer has more story ideas than they do stories.�� Even non-writers have lots of story ideas.�� ���What if?��� is a very prolific producer of seeds.

There���s a reason that tomatoes produce so many seeds.�� That���s because the likelihood of any one seed germinating is very small.�� Even if the seed germinates, there are a lot of things that can keep the plant from producing mature fruit.

When the plant is small, weather conditions are probably the biggest enemy.�� A newly germinated tomato plant is tiny.�� It has two little leaves and a thread-like stem.�� A heavy rainstorm can bury the baby plant in mud.�� Out here in New Mexico, the burying agent is more likely to be windborne sand.�� End result is the same.�� Death by suffocation.

Even when plants are large enough survive being buried, the challenge isn���t over. ����Cutworm grubs can girdle the stem of a young plant, cutting it off just below the soil line.�� ��A myriad of diseases, carried both in the soil and by insects, can infect your plants.�� Tomato hornworms (also called tomato worms or just ���hornworms,��� for short) love how tomato plants taste.�� I���ve seen a vital vine stripped bare in a few hours, holes drilled indiscriminately in both fruit and the stems of the plant.

Tomato plants are remarkably picky about the temperature range in which they���ll set fruit.�� Where I live, daily temperature shifts of thirty degrees are usual.�� Forty degrees are common.�� That means you can have a day in the eighties, dropping down to forties at night.�� This is very confusing to the plants, who can���t decide whether it���s summer or winter.

Uneven moisture can lead to cracking (sometimes called ���cat-facing���) and blossom-end rot.�� In both cases, with some judicious trimming, the tomato is usually edible, but it isn���t very attractive.

So why bother?�� After all there are lots of tomatoes out there.�� You can buy pretty good ones for as little as ninety-nine cents a pound.�� If you want to spend more, you can buy some really flavorful tomatoes.

I guess the only answer, whether you���re talking about tomatoes or stories, is you do it because you enjoy the process, even when the end result of the process is a deep sigh and a hope that things will work out better next time.�� If you don���t enjoy the process of planting the seed, seeing it sprout, feeding and watering the young plant so that it grows strong, watching the flowers develop, looking for the first blush on the green fruit, there���s no crime in letting someone else grow the tomatoes ��� or write the story.

But if you do enjoy the process, then the experience ��� not just the end result ��� is worth all the effort.�� And the flavor of something you���ve grown yourself is exquisite beyond belief.

P.S.�� I was just reminded that tomatoes once provided the seed of a story for me.�� It���s called ���Between Tomatoes and Snapdragons��� and will be reprinted in my forthcoming short story collection Prime Curiosities.

FF: Enjoyably Mixed

This last week, everything I���m reading is because someone recommended it to me!�� So far, no duds.

Lilies Toil Not. Do They Read?

Just in case you don���t know��� The Friday Fragments feature lists of what I���ve read over the past week. ��Most of the time I don���t include either short fiction or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.�� If you���re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive 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 few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.�� Audiobook.�� A fascinating, complexly structured novel.�� I���m still considering how I felt about the last twenty-five percent or so.�� Still, if you like post-apocalyptic novels, this is a good one.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison.�� I really liked this one.�� Although marketed as ���fantasy,��� probably because the two races involved are called, for no apparent reason I could figure out, ���elves��� and ���goblins��� ��� Are pointy ears enough? ��� it���s a solid novel of political intrigue with complex characters.�� Ms. Addison runs counter to a current trend in political fiction that assumes everyone will be as nasty as possible.�� There���s plenty of vinegar here, but she doesn���t forget the value of honey.

Sammy Keyes and the Hotel Thief by Wendelin VanDraanen.�� A mystery series that bridges the middle-grade into YA age group nicely ��� and still had a lot of appeal for this far from YA reader.�� I���ll be continuing to read about Sammy and her adventures.

In Progress:

Deep Secrets by Diana Wynne Jones.�� When Alan mentioned this one to me when we were writing our Tangents, I realized I hadn���t read it. ��I���m about half-way in and enjoying.�� A bonus is the lovingly realistic ��� although not at all snarky ��� depiction of the complex culture of an SF convention.

CryoBurn by Lois McMaster Bujold.�� Audiobook.�� A good mixture of SF speculation and intrigue, salted with humor.

Also:

The beginning of the month always brings in new magazines���

TT: Diana Wynne Jones — Quirky and Wise

JANE: Alan, last week you told me that you wanted to discuss a writer whose work I’ve been reading quite a bit of lately. When you indicated that this writer was Diana Wynne Jones, I was thrilled. Why don’t you start?

My First Diana Wynne Jones novel

ALAN: Probably the first Diana Wynne Jones novel that I read was Howl’s Moving Castle. I was absolutely blown away by the subtlety and depth of the plot, the witty writing and the complete weirdness of the central concept of a castle that is constantly on the move.�� The dialogue between Sophie and Calcifer, the fire-demon was brilliantly funny and Howl, the wizard, was suitably eccentric.

As I explored more of Diana Wynne Jones��� worlds, I quickly learned that this was typical of her stories ��� her plots were generally very convoluted, her prose was consistently witty and often laugh out loud funny and the situations in which her characters found themselves were often extremely bizarre.

JANE: I had a very different introduction to her works.�� Have you ever read her novel, Dogsbody?�� It is quite dark, incredibly moving, and deeply mythic in the absolutely best sense of that term.

The final sentence is full of beauty and I can rarely tell anyone about it without choking up.�� That said, this is not a downer of a book.�� It is the absolute opposite.

ALAN: Yes, I have read Dogsbody. Like you, I found it very moving and I was really impressed by the richness and depth of the plot. Taken at face value, it’s a simple story ��� Sirius, the Dog Star, has been convicted of murder. His punishment is to live as a dog on Earth. He will die there, unless he can find the Zoi, though he is not certain what that might be,

On the surface, that’s very straightforward and it is full of elements that the children she was writing for can appreciate and enjoy. But there’s so much more to it than that.�� Her books were always marketed as ���Young Adult��� stories (and were sometimes aimed at very young children). Nevertheless, her stories often had very adult themes and they were always full of references and allusions that probably went right over the heads of the children. Not that the children would care. They’d be far too wrapped up in the story; her plots were never less than enthralling. But it’s that extra depth, cleverness, and subtlety that make the books so satisfying for adults as well.

JANE: I do like Diana Wynne Jones��� quirky elements a great deal.�� However, if it wasn���t for the depth and cleverness ��� Howl���s Moving Castle is also a brilliant commentary on aging ��� I would not find her books as wonderful as I do.�� It���s easy to be quirky, almost TOO easy, as the boom in repetitive and stupid ���humorous��� fantasy in the late 1980���s, early 1990���s, demonstrated.

It���s humor with heart that has staying power����� Diana Wynne Jones had heart in ��� well, I can���t resist the pun ��� spades.

ALAN: She’d have liked your pun. She always enjoyed a good joke. A sense of fun is usually bubbling away just under the surface of even her most serious stories.

JANE: ��Yes.�� I agree.�� For all that I would classify Dogsbody as one of Diana Wynne Jones���s more serious works, one does need to accept a book in which one of the main point-of-view characters is simultaneously and completely a puppy and a stellar intelligence.�� I guess that���s quirky.

��Diana Wynne Jones��� gift is that she makes this work so well that I accepted this as easily as I accepted the elements of the plot that focus on Sirius��� human owner, the young Irish-born Kathleen, who lives with her horrible English aunt, her benignly neglectful uncle, and two boy cousins.

ALAN: Yes, that’s exactly correct. One of Diana Wynne Jones��� great strengths was that she could take stories set in the here and now, full of characters you can recognise, and then tie them together with mythological (or in the case of Dogsbody, cosmological) elements and make the stories work without losing the sense of reality.

Another good example would be Eight Days of Luke where David Allard, at home on holiday from boarding school and feeling somewhat bored, accidentally rescues a young boy called Luke who has an odd ability to control fire, although he assures David that he cannot raise the dead.

Soon other strange characters turn up looking for Luke. There’s Mr. Wedding who only has one eye, for example. It soon becomes clear that David is trapped inside a Norse myth ��� Luke is Loki, of course, and he is as mischievous, a source of trouble as always. The gods are locked in a struggle that will prepare them for G��tterd��mmerung. But meanwhile they have some problems. Mr. Wedding in particular is not happy with Luke. Perhaps David can help…

JANE: Oh!�� I remember that one!�� A friend loaned it to me, so I don���t have a copy.�� Now I feel a great need to find one.�� That���s the problem with Diana Wynne Jones��� books.�� They���re like an addiction.�� Jim recently went on a binge where he systematically read every one we had in the house.

ALAN: What a wonderful time he must have had! One thing I’ve noticed (and I’m sure Jim must noticed it as well because of reading so many books one after the other) is that even at her most light-hearted, there is always a serious undertone to Diana Wynne Jones��� stories.

In Deep Secret, we meet Rupert Venables who is the junior Magid of Earth. Magids are powerful magicians charged with maintaining the balance between positive and negative magic (presumably white and black magic in our terms) on the worlds they supervise. They seldom act overtly, but they do use their powers to push people into doing the right thing at the right time to make the right things happen. As the story opens, the senior Magid of Earth has just died and Rupert, helped by the ghost of the senior Magid, must choose a new junior Magid. He decides to conduct the examination of the candidates at an SF convention. After all, those things are so peculiar that nobody will ever notice any extra oddities introduced by his examination of the Magid candidates.

And so the stage is set for an, at times, somewhat squirmy tale. Read it, attend the SF convention and recognise yourself and many other people who you know. Diana Wynne Jones tells her story with deep affection and understanding, but she never misses an opportunity to make a barbed remark! The book is an utter delight from start to finish.

But despite all the fun (and it is great fun, make no mistake) there is a real and serious concern at the heart of the story. The magids may be metaphorical in real world terms but when you look at the news headlines, you sometimes wish they were actually here and doing their job.

JANE: Hmm����� I���m not sure I���ve read Deep Secret.�� I���ll need to add it to my list.

There are several really important things about Diana Wynne Jones and her work I���d hoped to bring up but the novels ��� as they should ��� took center stage.�� I���ll save it all for next time.

Maps: Limiting or Grounding?

News Flash: Artemis Invaded is now available for pre-order��as an audiobook from Audible.com.�� When the book is released on June 30th, it will be in your library and available for download.

And now, To Map or Not to Map����� a writerly question.

Roger Zelazny’s Map of Amber

As many of you know, over the last couple of Thursday Tangents, Alan Robson and I have been discussing street naming conventions ��� or rather, lack of conventions.�� At one point, I mentioned the map that appeared in the Firekeeper novels.�� This led to me being asked how much time I put into mapping out an area before beginning a story.

The answer is simple.�� Very little.�� Sometimes none at all.���� The ���map��� I used when writing Through Wolf���s Eyes and Wolf���s Head, Wolf���s Heart was scribbled on the back of an old envelope.�� Its main purpose was to make sure that I was consistent when referring to directions.�� I guess it served because when my editor (Teresa Nielsen Hayden) approached me, requesting a map that could be included in the novel, she clearly assumed that I had one.

Happily, for me, Jim is a fine cartographer.�� He drew the map (complete with contour elevations) that was adapted for the novel.

Nor am I the only writer to work this way.�� Steve Brust was recently asked if the rumored maps that would be accompanying a forthcoming work would be based on his ���real��� maps.�� Steve���s response was interesting:�� “I have maps of some stuff that I use so that I only contradict myself on purpose. But I don’t like to let them out of the house.”

(I particularly like the bit about ���contradicting myself on purpose���!)

Roger Zelazny had an elaborate poster-sized map of Amber printed, but this wasn���t because he felt he needed it in order to write the novels.�� It was simply because it amused him to do so.�� (He could be quite whimsical.�� He also had pencils printed with something along the lines of ���Property of Castle Amber Library.���)

When The Visual Guide to Castle Amber was commissioned by Bill Fawcett and Associates Inc., Roger spoke with the writers, artists, and cartographers.�� A detailed map of the castle, including floorplans for many of the individual rooms, was included in the book.�� Then, in the next novel, Roger arranged to have a very violent battle take place so that large portions of the castle���s interior would need to be rebuilt ��� freeing him from having to construct his stories according to a map.

On the other hand, I���ve known writers who lavish considerable attention on the maps of their fictional realms.�� Every mountain range is detailed, usually with little triangles.�� (I���ve lived in the midst of two different mountain ranges, and I���ve yet to see a mountain that looks like a triangle, especially up close.)�� Every river is named (sometimes three or four times, especially if they���re fans of Tolkien).�� Major cities are indicated and minor towns��� ����Forests.�� Oceans.

Advocates of maps say that charting out their terrain in advance of writing helps keep them grounded, to visualize the realities of the landscape. ����However, what too many mapmakers forget ��� especially those born into this era of fast and easy transportation ��� is that distance is not just a matter of miles, it���s a matter of, well, as a certain hobbit put it, getting ���there and back again.���

Especially if you���re writing a story set in a low tech environment, travel conditions matter as much as miles as measured.�� Muddy roads will slow you down.�� Paved roads will speed you up.�� (There���s a reason the Romans built so many roads��� )�� How heavily encumbered you are is crucial.�� Pack and riding animals don���t speed you up.�� They may actually slow you down ��� but if weather conditions are good, they may increase how far you can go on a given day.

As I���ve mentioned, I���m a gamer.�� My favorite gaming involves dice, paper, and a group of compatible souls.�� What I���ve learned from gaming ��� both from running numerous games and from being a player ��� is that when telling a story the macrocosm matters a lot less than the microcosm.�� That is, the precise distance between you the nearest city matters a lot less than who is standing closest to you when trouble hits.

When writing, I���m much more likely to make a quick sketch of who is where when combat or some other conflict is an element.�� I���m more likely to sketch a map of a small town or the interior of a building than I am of a continent.�� Part of this has to do with the fact that I rarely write from an omniscient narrative point of view.�� Instead, I take pleasure in seeing a scene close up and personal, just as my characters would.�� Sometimes this means knowing where, for example, Brenda���s bedroom is in relation to Pearl���s.�� Or who is sitting across from whom during an acrimonious debate.

There are times, however, when I agree that a detailed landscape map is very useful.�� One of these is when writing in collaboration with someone else.�� Especially for Treecat Wars, David Weber and I used maps to make sure that each of us were visualizing terrain elements in the same fashion.�� You don���t know until you���ve attempted to write with someone else how relative words like ���close��� and ���far,��� or ���just a short walk,��� can be.

Another time when a map is crucial is when writing fiction set in an actual setting.�� This applies whether you���re writing in a contemporary setting or hundreds or even thousands of years earlier.�� Writers of contemporary fiction have some interesting tools available to them.�� Resources like Google let a writer ���see��� a location as it is at a given moment.���� This can be very useful and a lot faster than getting someone to run over there and take a photo for you.�� Since ���given moment��� is just that ��� a moment ��� there are drawbacks, too.

Long before Google, I wrote a short story where I described a local museum, including the statues out front.�� By the time the story was published, the statues had been moved.�� The story still worked, thank goodness������� However, I had several local readers comment about this discrepancy.�� Now, courtesy of the web, anyone can be the equivalent of a local reader.

Should this paralyze you?�� Make you spend hours on researching your setting?�� Honestly, I don���t think so.�� As long as you don���t have rivers running uphill or major avenues running the wrong direction, readers will understand that transient details (which, in my case, included huge metal statues of dinosaurs) can change.

As I mentioned above, stories set in a historical context may also demand maps.�� One of the first resources I go to when working on a story in a historical setting is Shepherd���s Historical Atlas.�� While not perfect or all-inclusive, it is clear and useful ��� especially for making sure that the name you���re using for a given location or geographical feature is correct for the time period.�� These maps can���t give you travel times between two points, but at least they can give you an idea of the miles involved and the terrain features.

So what about SF?�� Why does mapmaking seem to be more associated with Fantasy than SF? ��I think one reason is that while Fantasy is often set in some form of imaginary world, SF is likely to be set in some variation of reality as we know it.�� Even if the story touches down on an alien planet, the contact is often restricted to one area (a starport city, for example).�� If it isnt���, high tech transportation makes the question of whether a forest or river or even an ocean is in the way not a matter for consideration in the story.�� Take a look, though����� The closer the story comes to creating a new world and exploring it in detail, the more likely it is that maps will show up!

So to map or not to map?�� My answer would be map as much as you need to tell your story, but never make the mistake of thinking that the map is the story, nor that having a map available to the reader means you are freed from the responsibility of writing prose that makes your setting live and breathe.

FF: Landscapes of Change

For those of you who are new to this piece��� The Friday Fragments feature lists of what I���ve read over the past week. ��Most of the time I don���t include either short fiction or magazine articles.

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

Kel Wonders What I’m Reading

Once again, this is not a book review column.�� It���s just a list with, maybe, a few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold.�� Audiobook.�� I liked this one.�� Bujold deserve praise for the skill she shows�� in writing a later book in a series, in which characters from earlier in the series are reintroduced.�� So many authors would either fall into info-dump or so little detail a newer reader is confused.�� She walks the balance with grace.

Beyond the Blast: Wasteland and Shelter in Nuclear Fiction.�� A Master���s thesis by my friend, Rowan Derrick.�� Fascinating and intelligent treatment of a complex topic.

In Progress:

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.�� Audiobook.�� A fascinating, complexly structured novel.�� I���m really fascinated.

The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison.�� Just started.�� Already has violated clich��d expectations.�� That���s good.

Also:

Still spending a lot of time reading my own stuff���

TT: Directionless in the Big City

ALAN: Before we carry on with this week’s tangent, did you realise that this is our 200th conversation. Good heavens, aren’t we chatty!

JANE: That seems incredible����� I���ve had so much fun.�� I salute you and invite you to ask me a question to get this historic 200th Tangent started.

Washington D.C.:Past and Future

ALAN: One question that springs immediately to my mind is that if a city like Washington is so carefully planned, who actually did the planning in the first place? Was it done by committee or was there a presiding genius? And another question ��� just how rigidly do the builders stick to the plan? Do the realities of construction ever force changes to be made to the plan?

JANE: As is so often the case with history, the simple answer and the one that most closely embraces the truth differ substantially.�� The simple answer regarding Washington D.C. was as follows: George Washington chose the site for the city.�� He then appointed a committee who, in turn, selected a Frenchman, Pierre Charles L���Enfant, to design the city.�� L���Enfant did.

Reality is a bit more complex.�� L���Enfant was chosen to design the city.�� He laid out a lovely plan that involved streets radiating out from the Capitol ��� then called ���The Congress House.����� This, in itself, shows how in the perception of the young United States of America, the Legislative Branch, rather than the Executive, was viewed as the most important.

L���Enfant had grand, sweeping ideas, including what ��� especially for that time ��� were astonishingly wide streets.�� From the start, he encountered protests from existing landowners.�� He annoyed various important ��� and sometimes only self-important ��� people with his tendency to want to keep control of the plans.�� Eventually, he was fired.

ALAN: Poor chap! So he got fired for doing what was asked of him. That’s not very fair..

JANE:�� Since when are politics ever fair?�� And, believe you me, building the capital city for a brand new nation ��� at a time when brand new nations were not at all the usual thing ��� was a very political event.

So, from the start, the plan for Washington, D.C., was distorted by the desires of people who were thinking of their immediate goals, rather than of creating a perfect planned city.

Some years ago, I wrote a short story called ���Tigers in the Capital.����� It���s a free-flowing narration in which L���Enfant, still alive in the story���s present day, talks about all the changes his beloved city has undergone and how those alterations to his original plan have led to many of the nation���s problems.�� All the facts about D.C.���s evolution, well ��� at least all of those except those that applied to the futuristic part of the story ��� are accurate.�� In the end, I was beginning to convince myself���

ALAN: So the actual answer to my original questions about how it came to be designed is ���all the above.���

JANE: Thou art supremely correct, my friend!

I realized we have ��� in the best fashion possible ��� tangented away from your original question as to whether roads in cities in the United States are named in such a fashion that you can tell which direction they run simply by whether they are a street or an avenue.

ALAN: Yes ��� I was most impressed by that scheme. Directionally challenged people such as myself would find it a great help. I never know what direction I’m facing in and I need all the help I can get!

JANE: As I said earlier, sadly, this is not the case.�� Sometimes a street won���t even have a same name along its entire length ��� much less keep the same designation.�� A good example of this is Monta��o Road, which runs east to west through most of Albuquerque, which changes its identity at where it crosses Interstate 25.�� At this point it becomes Montgomery Boulevard.

Please note, neither of these are ���streets��� or ���avenues,��� thus violating the neat provision you mentioned earlier that all, uh, roads that run north-south are called ���avenues��� and all those that run east-west are ���streets.���

ALAN: We sometimes have the opposite happening. There’s a street in Auckland called Great South Road which passes through several suburbs. It keeps the same name all the way, but every time it reaches a new suburb the buildings start numbering again from the beginning. So, 42 Great South Road (for example) may well exist in half a dozen locations…

JANE: Oh!�� That would be completely maddening.�� We do sometimes have streets (or roads or avenues) with the same name, but they usually possess some additional designation, like ���SW��� or ���NW.����� Zip codes (which I believe you guys call ���postal codes���) can also help clarify which particular street is indicated.

Is there anything to help you figure out which 42 Great South Road you want or do you need to drive up and down, staring at signs and saying ���Ah-hah!�� There���s the sign for the eye doctor���s office.�� This must be the 42 Great South Road we want!���

ALAN: No, there’s nothing to help you identify the 42 Great South Road that you want. You just have to keep going until you find one that looks right. And if it proves to be the wrong one, you just get back in your car and keep going. However, since the numbering starts again with each new suburb, one possible solution is to wait until you reach the appropriate suburb before you start checking the numbers. Unfortunately this turns out to be a much harder problem to solve because the suburbs aren’t sign-posted…

JANE: That sounds like purest insanity����� I recall an Agatha Christie novel in which the mystery hinged on an incorrectly delivered piece of mail because, at the time the story was written, houses had names, not numbers.�� I���d thought that would be impossible these days, but I see the concept could easily be updated to happening in Auckland.

��I think you���d like living in Albuquerque ��� at least from the question of having an easy solution to being directionally challenged.�� Directly east of the city is the great up-thrust bulk of the Sandia Mountains.�� This makes it very easy ��� in fact, nearly impossible not ��� to know which way is east.�� After that, all other directions are easily deduced.

When I first came house hunting here, I was very puzzled that my realtor would give me directions based not on ���turn right��� or ���turn left��� but ���turn east��� or ���turn west.����� When I asked her to please clarify, she enlightened me as why she gave directions that way.�� After that, I rapidly joined the confident navigators of Albuquerque.

My mother, who, like you, has never been certain about directions, was very impressed when she���d hear me saying things like ���Jim, the place we want is just a bit further south.����� We let her in on the secret and, to this day, when she visits us, she will occasionally chirp up with ���We���re going north now, aren���t we?��� or similar comments, just for the pleasure of it.

ALAN: Oh, your mother is a lady after my own heart. I’d say exactly the same thing for exactly the same reason. Please tell her that we are soul mates.

Meanwhile, there’s an author you mentioned recently in your Friday Fragment who I’d really like to talk about…

JANE: Whisper in my ear��� [Listens.]�� Oh!�� Absolutely!�� That would be wonderfully fun.

Firekeeper and Mowgli Crossover Announced!

News Flash: Tonight, at 6:45 p.m. I���m keynote speaker for UNM���s ���Intellectual Hooliganism��� colloquium.�� My talk���s title is ���Inverting the Rules or Why We Love Fools.����� It���s free and open to the public.�� For more information, contact UNM Hobbit Society at tolkien@unm.edu, call Dr. Leslie Donovan at (505) 277-4313��or visit the UNM Hobbit Society website at www.unm.edu/~tolkien

And now for some breaking news����� Negotiations have been concluded between the estate of Rudyard Kipling and Obsidian Tiger Inc. for a crossover series featuring my own Firekeeper and Kipling���s archetypal feral boy, Mowgli.

Meeting of Feral Minds!

Mowgli, as many of you know, is the central character in Kipling���s seminal works, The Jungle Books, which feature such stories as ���Mowgli���s Brothers,��� ���Kaa���s Hunting,��� ���Letting in the Jungle,��� and ���The Spring Running.���

Firekeeper is introduced in Through Wolf���s Eyes.�� Her adventures continue through six volumes, concluding (at least at this point in time) with Wolf���s Blood.

The Kipling estate has long been seeking someone to expand upon Mowgli���s adventures, especially someone who ���has actually read the books, rather than only seen the movies.����� Additionally, they wanted someone who understood at a gut level Mowgli���s essentially mythic nature.�� In a recent press release, the estate says:

���In Jane Lindskold, we have found the writer we feel Rudyard Kipling would have chosen himself to introduce Mowgli to the twenty-first century.�� As works like Changer and Legends Walking (aka Changer���s Daughter) demonstrate, Lindskold is completely comfortable writing about larger-than-life mythic characters.�� Her collaborations with Roger Zelazny and David Weber show a singular talent for working with another author, blending voices, and yet bringing her own distinctive contributions to the work.���

Why do these stories as a crossover with the Firekeeper novels, rather than simply continuing Mowgli���s own story?�� Again, we turn to the press release:

���We felt that keeping Mowgli locked in a historical context, one that could not help but eventually cross with some uncomfortable political realities, as Mowgli leaves the Jungle, would become stultifying.�� Yet, if we kept Mowgli locked in the Jungle, we would violate Kipling���s own sense that, eventually, Mowgli needs to expand, to, in fact, grow-up.���

Will the stories take place in Firekeeper���s own universe then?�� Well, yes and no. Again, we turn to the press release:

���In the first novel, Firekeeper and Blind Seer will venture into the Old Country.�� There they will find a gate that opens ��� not to another part of their own world ��� but to Mowgli���s Jungle.�� Some years will have passed since the events Kipling recorded in ���The Spring Running��� and Mowgli will be feeling restricted by village life.�� When he hears the wolves of the Seeonee Pack howling about the arrival of a ���stranger, strange,��� (this last a deliberate evocation of the opening of Through Wolf���s Eyes), he will be drawn to investigate and will meet this strange pair, and investigate the causes of this trans-dimensional gate.

���Eventually, Mowgli will, with Gray Brother, join Firekeeper and Blind Seer in their explorations of the Old World.

���We don���t see any shortage of stories.�� However, we���ve been approached by Hayao Miyazaki, who is interested in seeing his Princess Mononoke and her giant wolves included in this fascinating human/wolf pack.���

Ahem����� April Fool!�� Not the part about the talk, but the part about Firekeeper and Mowgli���

Hope to see some of you tonight!�� No fooling!

FF: Flavors of Faerie

Purely by accident, I ended up reading two novels dealing with the Fay ��� and focusing on how not very nice the ���little people��� are, even when they���re being friendly���

Adara (the terrier) contemplates her name-giver, Adara the Huntress

For those of you who are new to this piece��� The Friday Fragments feature lists of what I���ve read over the past week. ��Most of the time I don���t include either short fiction or magazine articles.

The Fragments are not meant to be a recommendation list.�� If you���re interested in a not-at-all-inclusive 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 few opinions tossed in.

Recently Completed:

Lords and Ladies by Terry Pratchett.�� I���d just finished reading Soul Music when I learned Pratchett had died, so I picked up this one just because����� It���s very good, but if you���re stuck on Tolkienesque elves, I don���t recommend.�� These are definitely more myffic.

War for the Oaks by Emma Bull.�� I picked this one up because I wanted to double-check a detail for this week���s Wandering on Kick-Ass Female Characters.�� I ended up re-reading the whole novel.�� As with Lords and Ladies, Bull���s ���faerie��� folk owe their source to a complex and sometimes very dark brew of myth and legend.

In Progress:

Diplomatic Immunity by Lois McMaster Bujold.�� Audiobook.�� So far, quite interesting���

Also:

Far, far, far too much proofreading���