Jane Lindskold's Blog, page 89

The Revenge of Mega Radish!

Yep.  That’s a radish.  And the thing Jim put in the photo for scale is about the size of a standard baseball – that is, about nine inches in circumference.  It doesn’t look real, does it?   We should have used a ruler.

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Mega Radish!

That’s not the only radish that size we’ve gotten, although it is the most pleasingly symmetrical.  For those of you who take interest in such things, no, these weren’t seeds intended to grow giant radishes.  They were standard Easter Egg radishes.

So, what else (besides giant radishes) is going on here?

There’s the mystery of the missing cucumber and chard seedlings.  (Solution: probably snails.)

Or maybe not…   We haven’t seen any snails lately.  I wonder why?

Join me now and we shall delve more deeply into the mystery.

Darkness has fallen.  One by one, the lights in the surrounding houses go out.  In the tiny ornamental pond, toads gather among the stems of the blue pickerel weed and aquatic plantain, soaking up moisture before going on the prowl.  They are the great night hunters of this urban garden, confident in their supremacy.

But, as the toads are about to heave themselves from their refreshing bath, a peculiar vibration ripples through the sandy soil.  The toads sink below the water so only their tiny eyes protrude above the surface.  Doubtless this saves them.  For, at that moment, from the garden bed west of the pond it comes, moving with astonishing lightness on tiny rootlets, leafy greenery towering above, sensing the least motion in its surroundings: Mega-Radish has arisen…

Forth it stalks, seeking what?  The toads do not know.  They only bubble sighs of relief as the gargantuan vegetable passes by the pond, and vanishes from sight.  But the hawk moths, large as hummingbirds, deep drinkers of the nectar of the sacred datura, are awake, dreaming on the wing, believing at first that what they see is a result of imbibing too much potent pollen.

Moving on many minute rippling rootlets Mega Radish races around the shed, down the path, to a small plot where infant seedlings of Swiss Chard and Armenian cucumbers tremble, rooted in fear, unable to move as the slime trailing terrors, the horrid garden snails, emerge from their daytime sanctuary within the tangle of Virginia Creeper, prepared to engulf the tender leaves of the infant plants.

Night after night this horrid slaughter has been repeated.  Night after night the seedlings have been helpless, but tonight the cry for help has been heard.  Mega Radish, hero of the garden, has ripped itself from its vegetative torpor and come to save the day.

Red and round, it launches!  It rolls!  Beneath its incarnadined rind it smashes the snails.  They are demolished so completely that their shells become naught but flakes of calcium to feed the soil, their slimy bodies return moisture to the ground.  The seedling cucumbers and chard wave their thanks.  The arugula – too spicy for the snails, but nonetheless terrified – joins the chorus.

Mega Radish takes a bow and then, on twinkling rootlets, vanishes into the darkness…

Well, maybe not.  But it’s a fun idea.

Have a lovely day.  May Mega Radish watch over you!

FF: Secret Histories

Secrets, especially those long-hidden, are perennially fascinating.  They play a major role in all the books I’m reading this week.

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 magazines.

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:

Gardens of New Spain: How Mediterranean Plants and Foods Changed America by William W. Dunmire.  This is really excellent because in addition to the subject in the title, it talks about how plants spread, why, and their cultural impact.  Additional bonus: histories – going back to earliest cultivation – of various key plants.  I seriously loved this book.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.  Audiobook.  Re-listen.  Enjoyed again.

In Progress:

The Secret History of Wonder Woman by Jill Lepore.  A gloriously footnoted look at the people and events who shaped the development the iconic comic book character.  No.  I haven’t seen the movie yet!  This book was actually a Christmas present I’m finally getting to read.

Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie.  Audiobook.  Re-read.

The Return of the Twelves by Pauline Clarke.  A middle grade story about some magical wooden soldiers twisted up with the juvenilia of the famous Brontes.

Also:

Still working on Smithsonian.  Actually reading the current, hi-tech issue while waiting for Jim to finish the one before.

TT: A Question of Identity

JANE: Last time you said you had an obvious question for me.

ALAN: Yes – I have three, actually.

JANE: Three?  I begin to feel as if we’re entering a fairytale – or at least a Monty Python sketch.

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A Character in Amber

Prithee, sir knight, what is your first question?

ALAN:  The first concerns Roger Zelazny. I hope I’m not betraying a confidence, but you told me once that Roger had put himself into one of the Amber books. Can you tell me about that?

JANE: Oh…  Roger’s cameo is hardly a secret.  It happens in The Hand of Oberon, the fourth Amber novel.  In it, Corwin, one of the Nine Princes of Amber whose tale is told in these novels, ventures into the dungeons and has a short chat with one of the guards.

Is this ringing a bell for you?

ALAN: No, not at all. It’s many years since I last read the book and my memories of it are very hazy.

JANE: The scene is short, so let me quote it in full:

“Good evening, Lord Corwin,” said the lean, cadaverous figure who rested against a storage rack, smoking his pipe, grinning around it.

“Good evening, Roger. How are things in the nether world?”

“A rat, a bat, a spider. Nothing much else astir. Peaceful.”

“You enjoy this duty?”

He nodded.

“I am writing a philosophical romance shot through with elements of horror and morbidity. I work on those parts down here.”

“Fitting, fitting,” I said. “I’ll be needing a lantern.”

He took one from the rack, brought it to flame from his candle.

“Will it have a happy ending?” I inquired.

He shrugged.

“I’ll be happy.”

“I mean, does good triumph and hero bed heroine? Or do you kill everybody off?”

“That’s hardly fair,” he said.

“Never mind. Maybe I’ll read it one day.”

“Maybe,” he said.

 ALAN: Oh, that’s nice. As you know, I’ve met Roger and I had several conversations with him. The dialogue in that piece is pure Roger. I can so easily imagine him saying those things. He captured his own wry, sardonic humour perfectly.

Alfred Hitchcock and Peter Jackson always have a cameo in their own films. How good to see a writer following that tradition in prose.

JANE: Yes.  But it really doesn’t capture Roger…  He wasn’t only wry and sardonic.  He could also be ridiculously silly.  When we lived together, he used to sing nonsense songs to the cats.  He could be sweetly sentimental.  When our guinea pig had babies, he was the one who wanted to keep all of them.  (We did.)

You don’t need to take my word for these aspects of his personality.  The forthcoming anthology Shadows and Reflections includes a final, non-fiction piece by his daughter, Shannon, who was a high school student when she lost her dad.  It’s very moving and, of the many tributes to Roger that I’ve read, it comes closest to capturing the man I knew and loved.

ALAN: I’ll definitely have to buy that when it comes out. I only saw Roger’s public face, of course, but I can easily imagine him being all those things.

JANE: What gets me is how many people want Roger not to be Roger but to be one of his characters.  The most common are Sam (from Lord of Light) or Corwin (from the Amber novels); a runner-up seems to be Conrad from This Immortal.  These people support the contention that these characters “were” him by showing similarities in skills or life experiences, creating the false syllogism that “if this is true, then so must the rest be.”

It’s a long-standing issue, going back to some of the earliest literary criticism written about Roger’s works (interestingly enough, his childhood friend, and literary biographer Carl Yoke is the least likely to make the equation), but one that persists to the diminishment of the multi-dimensional human he was.  I’ll stop there lest I begin to rant…

ALAN: That’s actually a very good rant. It generally makes no sense to go that far. You might just as well say that David Copperfield (the hero of the novel, not the stage magician) is Charles Dickens – after all, they are both novelists!

Have any other writers of your acquaintance put themselves into their books?

JANE: Well, yes and no.  I can’t think of examples off the cuff, but I certainly know writers who perpetually return to the same themes because they are working out their personal issues.  I don’t want to go further than that.

ALAN: Perhaps that’s wise.

I know you quite well, and I’ve read most of your published fiction, but there is nobody in any of your novels that I could point to and say “That’s Jane.” How much of that is deliberate?

JANE: Probably quite a lot.  I was very influenced as a Lit student by how some of my professors seemed to want to dwell less on the literary work of an author and more on his or her life.  Yeats’s obsession with Maud Gonne.  T.S. Eliot’s nervous breakdown.  D.H. Lawrence’s various entanglements.  On and on…  Sure, some of that was in the work, but there was always more, a whole lot more, but much of that was treated as if it had only been created as a disguise for the author “really” writing autobiography.

At the same time, I read T.S. Eliot’s essay “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and was very hit by his discussion of how the artist transmutes life experiences into art.   It’s in the second section, if you want to read all of it, but the final sentence captures some of his argument.

“…but the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material.”

ALAN: I think natural human curiosity makes a reader want to know more about a writer that they admire, if only to try and understand what makes the writer approach their art in the way that they do.

I think I told you that I used to live in Eastwood, the Nottinghamshire village where Lawrence was brought up. There were still people in the village who remembered him and I’m sure that if he’d ever come back to the village they’d have hanged, drawn and quartered him. Even forty years after Lawrence’s death, there was still a lot of residual anger about the way he’d portrayed them. I’m sure that says something about the literary choices he made, though I confess I’m not sure exactly what.

Cases as blatant as Kingsley Amis, who we discussed last time, are actually quite rare. But nevertheless there’s a very famous SF writer who some people think put a lot of himself into his books. Shall we talk about him next time?

JANE: Absolutely!

When the Gods Are Silent E-book Now Available!

Back in January, I promised you there would be lots going on in 2017.  The release of When the Gods Are Silent as an e-book – following on March’s e-book release of Smoke and Mirrors – is only part of my keeping that promise.  Let me start with When the Gods Are Silent.  Then I’ll drop a few hints about other projects I’m working on.

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When the Gods Are Silent

When the Gods Are Silent is my 1997 mythic sword and sorcery novel.  It was my first attempt at writing what is often termed “imaginary world fiction” at novel length – that is, fiction where I created the entire world, as well as the characters and story.  My earlier novels: Brother to Dragons, Companion to Owls; Marks of Our Brothers; The Pipes of Orpheus, and Smoke and Mirrors had all used some variation on our world or at least the mythic history of our world or a futuristic extrapolation.

So, in a way, When the Gods Are Silent is an older cousin of the Firekeeper novels which are set in a very complex imaginary world.

For those of you who already have When the Gods Are Silent, I will add that the e-book contains a bonus afterpiece talking about some of the things that influenced me when I was writing the book.

When the Gods Are Silent is available DRM free from Kindle, Nook, Google Play, iTunes, and Kobo.

Want to know more about When the Gods Are Silent?  Here’s the cover blurb.

Sharp-tempered, dangerous, yet fiercely loyal, Rabble is a skilled warrior who knows both too much and too little of her past.

Discovered unconscious at the side of the road by the Travelling Spectacular, Rabble willingly becomes a member of this eclectic band of wandering entertainers.  But her life and theirs are about to be disrupted by Hulhc, a prosperous farmer who is obsessed with finding the magic that vanished without warning over fifty years before.

Will any of them survive their search for the answer to a question about which the gods themselves are silent?

If you prefer print books, a limited number of the original mass market paperback are still available on my website bookstore.

 Prices include shipping and handling.  As always, signing and personalization are free!

Now…  How about what’s coming?

The other day, someone asked me if all I’m doing is working with getting my older material out.  The answer is “Absolutely not!”  I’m currently writing a new novel, which takes place in an entirely new setting.  The story will stand on its own but, already, the characters are hinting they have other stories to tell.

Moreover, I’m planning to bring out Asphodel, an extremely strange novel I wrote last year.  I’m reading the manuscript  of Asphodel to a group of friends.  When I’m done with that, I’ll give it a final polish and start getting it ready for the press.

Finally, I’m beginning to lay the groundwork for some projects that will take me back to some familiar settings and audience-favorite characters.  Since I want to finish a rough draft of my current novel first, you won’t see what I’m working on for a while.  So, let’s just leave it at “You asked and I’m listening.”

Consider going to my website and signing up for my mailing list, so you don’t miss any of the new releases, updates, contests, and promotions I have planned for the year to come!

FF: Gardens and Games

The long weekend didn’t give me quite as much reading time as I’d hoped, but I managed some.

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Reading Among the Flowers

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 magazines.

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:

Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser.  Audiobook.   A look at the campaign in Burma during WWII, from the infantry, non-officer level – very intimate.    I think it could be subtitled: George MacDonald Fraser is not Flashman and wants you to know it.

In Progress:

Gardens of New Spain: How Mediterranean Plants and Foods Changed America by William W. Dunmire.  This is really excellent because in addition to the subject in the title, it talks about how plants spread, why, and their cultural impact.  Additional bonus: histories – going back to earliest cultivation – of various key plants.

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline.  Audiobook.  Re-listen.

Also:

Reading back issues of Smithsonian.  I’d gotten amazingly behind.  Now reading about the Liberty Bell’s coast-to-coast tour.

TT: Is That the Author?

ALAN: When we were talking about Cordwainer Smith, I remarked in passing that one of his characters was possibly a representation of Smith himself. That seemed to strike a chord with you and you disagreed strongly. So how about we take a closer look at the idea of writers appearing in their own stories? And perhaps as we examine the idea, we might pin down the reasons why you believe that it is less common than some people think.

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Kel Untangles the Issue

JANE: I’m all for that.  However, I’d like to clarify what it is that makes me uncomfortable:  That’s when readers assume that a character is “really” the author.  Certainly some authors deliberately fictionalize themselves, but even the specifics of how that is handled are worthy of discussion.

Do you have any examples to start us off?

ALAN: As it happens, I do. Kingsley Amis is a writer I admire enormously. Amis was, shall we say, rather plump and he was also well known to enjoy extramarital affairs. Lots of them. Once when he and he wife were on holiday Amis fell asleep on the beach. His wife took her lipstick and wrote “One Fat Englishman – I fuck anything” on his back. Then she took a photo of what she’d done and sent it to everybody she knew. Amis was apparently much amused (and a little appalled).

His next novel was called One Fat Englishman and the viewpoint character was a serial fornicator. I find it really hard to avoid seeing the author as the protagonist of that novel!

JANE: Since I haven’t read One Fat Englishman, I’m a little crippled in my ability to respond.  However, I have read (and really loved) Amis’s Lucky Jim, so I’m with you on admiring his writing.

But let’s look at your contention that “the author” is the protagonist.  I’d be inclined to say that Amis used his own experiences and even tried to turn his wife’s indignation to his own advantage, but that’s as far as I’d go.

Why?  Because there’s a big difference between autobiography – which itself is fraught with issues as I’ve noted in one of my Wanderings – and fiction.  In fiction, the author is free to change events to fit the fictional model.  Therefore, before I’d say a character “is” the author, I’d want to read something (essay, comment in interview) saying “Yep.  That’s me.”

ALAN: You are correct when you say that “…Amis used his own experiences and even tried to turn his wife’s indignation to his own advantage” and in the absence of any further evidence that’s probably as far as anyone can legitimately go.

But I have information that you don’t have. I’ve read Amis’ delightfully gossipy autobiography Memoirs and I’ve read several reminiscences of him by other writers – notably Colin Wilson’s The Angry Years – and while I don’t think Amis ever specifically said that he was the protagonist of One Fat Englishman, the character and the man himself are so alike in thought, word and deed that trying to tell them apart becomes something of a futile exercise.

JANE: Ah… But then autobiography itself can be an exercise in fictionalizing the self.  That’s why reading an autobiography is not always preferable to a well-researched biography if you want to learn about someone.  However, I do find it interesting that the person recalled in other people’s reminiscences and Amis’s portrayal of himself seem to be in sync.

ALAN: I won’t ask you to take what I say completely on trust, so let me give you another opinion.

Ever since the Great Library Purge of 2014 I’ve slowly been re-buying old favourites as ebooks. My recently purchased ebook of One Fat Englishman has an introduction by David Lodge, himself a respected novelist and academic. If I may quote:

[The protagonist] is rude, arrogant, snobbish, lecherous, treacherous, greedy and totally selfish… His thoughts, and often his speech, are crammed with offensive observations about Jews, Negroes, women, homosexuals and Americans in general. He eats like a pig and drinks like a fish. He is quite conscious of these traits and habits, and perversely proud of them…

In 1963, knowing little about Kingsley Amis except through his writings, I was puzzled to know why he had taken such pains to create this vividly unpleasant character. In my memory, many other fans of his work were equally baffled and disappointed. But in the light of Amis’s subsequent literary development, and all the biographical information that has emerged since his death, One Fat Englishman seems a much more comprehensible and interesting novel – also funnier, in its black way – than I remembered. It now seems obvious that [the protagonist] was, in many respects, a devastating and prophetic self-portrait.

JANE: Ouch!  Talk about using one’s own writing as catharsis.  That’s amazing, and really very sad.

ALAN: There’s a very delicate, and hard to pin down, line in the sand here. I think we need to distinguish carefully between characters who are presented as experiencing aspects of the author’s life (because those aspects are important to the novel) and characters who are so close to the author that separating the two turns into rather pointless hairsplitting.

JANE: Elegantly put!  Last week, you commented that you felt that Lord Jestacost was, to some extent, Cordwainer Smith putting himself into his own book.  Maybe you could examine that contention within the parameters you’ve established in the statement above.

ALAN: I’ll try – Jestacost appears in several of Smith’s stories. As I recall he is generally benevolent (something that is not typical of the Lords of the Instrumentality). Jestacost is politically aware, not afraid to take sides, and very adept at maneuvering his political opponents. Paul Linebarger (aka Smith) was himself all of these things. He was a political and military advisor in China, Malaya and Korea and he (literally!) wrote the book on brainwashing: Psychological Warfare. Jestacost’s role in the Rediscovery of Man has many correspondences with Linebarger’s real life preoccupations.

I’m not completely sure on which side of the line that I drew in the sand Jestacost/Linebarger stands. Perhaps he straddles it. Smith didn’t write enough fiction for us to have any degree of certainty about the question. But there are parallels…

JANE: I see why you would want to say Jestacost “is” Linebarger.  I would place the line in the sand by saying that Linebarger used his own experiences to make Jestacost a believable and complex character.

“Write what you know,” after all, is something that would-be writers are often told.

One thing just came to me…  In a sense, Paul Linebarger always wrote at one remove from himself.  I believe all his work was published under pseudonyms.   So, even Cordwainer Smith can be considered a character…

ALAN: Good point! I hadn’t thought of that. Meanwhile it occurs to me that you are a writer and you know many other writers, so I have an obvious question to ask you. Perhaps we can investigate that next time?

Pretty Nonsense

Recently, I mentioned to a friend that, as an interruption in a busy weekend that was too full of Things To Do and too little with fun, Jim and I had dropped into an antiques and collectibles mall.  My friend asked, “Out of curiosity, what interests you most?  Furniture?  Jewelry….?”

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Junk?

My answer probably didn’t surprise her.  “Neither.  Weird stuff.  Oddities.  Sometimes flat-out junk.  Occasionally, I’ll buy one of those jars full of odds and ends of costume jewelry or buttons.  My short story ‘The Button Witch’ came directly from making such a purchase.”

It did, too…

Often I don’t buy anything at all.  I just wander around, soaking in all the things that people have decided are important enough to keep, that other people have decided are important enough to buy.  I’m not looking for inspiration as such but, without such fueling stops, after a while the only things I would end up writing about would be cats, gardens, and guinea pigs.

Sometimes, though, we do buy something.  Old books, especially ones long out of print, are favorites.  No surprise there.

Last year Jim bought me a magnificent Chinese brocade shawl lined in velvet.  When I protested I had nowhere to where such an elaborate thing, he said, “You can wear it to the Bubonicon Afternoon Tea.”  So I did.

Another time I bought a battered wooden lap desk.   I took it home, sanded it (with a little help from Jim) and then sealed it with “pecan” Minwax.  It still looks a bit battered, but shiny.  I’m considering covering the lid with a collage of cancelled postage stamps, and then using it to keep my stationery.  However, I need a lot more stamps before I can do that…

Such trips, where what we’ll see is completely unpredictable, are like mini-holiday for the brain.  I’m curious.  What do you do when you’re feeling a need for stimulation?

FF: Immersed

I’m still immersed in my non-fiction reads, but even more immersed in writing and researching, so I’m not reading as much as I’d like.  Maybe over the forthcoming long weekend I’ll manage a couple of good hours.

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A Garden in New Spain

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 magazines.

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.

In Progress:

Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser.  Audiobook.   A look at the campaign in Burma during WWII, from the infantry, non-officer level – very intimate.    I think it could be subtitled: George MacDonald Fraser is not Flashman and wants you to know it.

Gardens of New Spain: How Mediterranean Plants and Foods Changed America by William W. Dunmire.  Jim gave me this for a gift.  Just started.

Also:

Finished my proofing of When the Gods Are Silent, and am moving on to other, mysterious projects!

TT: Downtrodden, Not Uplifted

JANE: So, last time we decided we were going to talk about Cordwainer Smith’s underpeople.  Why don’t you explain what these are?

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Underpeople Tales

Alan: Ah! The underpeople! They are hugely important in Smith’s stories. As the name implies, they are second class citizens, not quite people. They are descended (or perhaps “manufactured” would be a better word) in some mysterious, and never explained, way from animal precursors.

JANE: “Manufactured” is definitely the correct term.  Precisely how the underpeople are created is one of the many ways that Cordwainer Smith breaks the rules.  Most SF writers would at least make hand-waving motions indicating science-in-action when talking about how these animal-human creatures were created.  Terms like “gene-splicing” or “activation of dormant genetic potentials” would be used, and we would meet scientists who create underpeople.

Instead, Smith just gives them to us, and isn’t even consistent in how they are described.  Some are more like animals, some nearly indistinguishable from humans.  What is important is that something in their animal nature makes them ideal for certain tasks.

ALAN: Quite so.  A very good example of this is B’dikkat, the underperson who is so important to the prisoners on the planet named Shayol.

Just as an aside, the names of the underpeople are all prefixed with a single letter that indicates their ancestry. The B’ in B’dikkat tells us that he is descended from bovine stock.

JANE: B’dikkat’s bovine qualities make him perfect for his rather horrible job.  I can’t say what that job is without providing too much of a spoiler for the story, but B’dikkat’s bovine instinct for the preservation of the herd plays a large role, as does his lack of an inclination to kill.  One of the major elements of the story’s climax could not occur if B’dikkat was not a cattle-derived underperson.  That Cordwainer Smith can make the reader believe in B’dikkat’s nature is part of his genius.

ALAN: The underpeople always maintain many of their animal characteristics, and it’s those attributes that make them so useful to the Lords of the Instrumentality in maintaining a society in which the majority of humans do very little useful.

Perhaps the most important underperson is the cat person C’mell.  She appears in several stories. C’mell is named after Linebarger’s favourite cat, Melanie. Like you and me, Cordwainer Smith was a cat person.

JANE: Indeed he was, “real” cats are crucial in an earlier story in his future history’s timeline: “The Game of Rat and Dragon.”

As to C’mell, “important” is a deceptive word.  She is definitely a key figure in several stories, including “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard,” “The Ballad of Lost C’mell,” and the novel Norstilia, but she would not consider herself important.  Importance belongs to D’Joan, whose tragic story is told in “The Dead Lady of Clown Town,” and to the mysterious and powerful E’telekeli, one of the central figures in Norstrilia.

ALAN: Nevertheless, C’mell has a pivotal role to play. She is a “girlygirl” at Earthport where she takes care of off-world visitors. I remember her as a high class call girl, but when I re-read the novel to prepare for this tangent I discovered that my memory had embroidered her role a bit – really she has more in common with a geisha.

C’mell has little choice in her role. None of the underpeople do, and they resent being cast as second class citizens. Here Smith is drawing clear parallels with the American civil rights movement. He sees such unrest leading to open revolt and so does Lord Jestacost of the Instrumentality.

Jestacost also appears in many of Smith’s stories.  (I am firmly of the opinion that Jestacost is actually Smith himself.) He seems an untypical Lord in that he is more open-minded than most, more aware of what is happening around him. He is not blind to the implications and consequences of the actions of the Instrumentality, and he works actively to manipulate events.

JANE: Ooh…  It’s always dangerous to equate a character and the author.  Moreover, it diminishes the story by making a vital character into nothing more than a mouthpiece for the author’s opinions.

Jestacost has a reason for being the way he is.  His birth is a direct reaction to the events in “The Dead Lady of Clown Town.”  His mother, Lady Goroke – herself a member of the  Instrumentality – says near the end of the story:

“I’m going to have a child, and I’m going back to Manhome to have it.  And I’m going to do the genetic coding myself.  I’m going to call him Jestocost.  That’s one of the Ancient Tongues, the Parsoskii one, for ‘cruelty,’ to remind him where he comes from and why.  And he, or his son, or his will bring justice back into the world and solve the puzzle of the underpeople.”

ALAN: I agree that it’s rather simplistic to equate a character with the author. Jestacost is much more than that, and your analysis of his personality is spot on. But I can’t help feeling that Smith is an aspect of Jestacost in the same way that Robert Heinlein is an aspect of Jubal Harshaw in Stranger in a Strange Land. There’s no one-to-one correspondence, but each is an influence on the other.

JANE: All characters – even the worst — are aspects of the author who creates them.  Both my writer-self and my Lit professor-self rebel against equating.  But I shall leave it there.

Go on…

ALAN: Is this one of those “agree to differ” moments? I think it is… Never mind. Onward!

Jestacost finds C’mell to be a useful go-between, linking the groundswell of revolution among the underpeople to the interests of the Instrumentality, hopefully to the advantage of both.

This is the Rediscovery of Man – after centuries of being lotus-eaters, humanity is reawakening to a life of uncertainty and possible peril. It is the beginning of the end of their sterile utopia.

JANE: To say more would be to provide a major spoiler for the end of Norstilia, so instead I think the time has come to leave the peculiar yet oddly coherent universe of Cordwainer Smith behind and sail for other stars.

Open Letter to Annaka

Dear Annaka,

Last week on Twitter, I asked you about your writing.  You told me you write YA.  That you like to write about girls/women, friendships, and adventures, large and small.  You also admitted to feeling you have a problem with becoming verbose – specifically that you found yourself getting caught up in character exploration side plots that, once written, you ended up really liking.  Therefore, you didn’t want to discard them.  Instead, you wove them back into the plot.

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Some of My Gardens

Finally, you wondered how I managed to keep the “richness” of my characters in my own stories without dragging down the plot.

First, thanks for the compliment…  Second… I’ll admit, there’s no real formula.  I thought that here, freed from the telegraphic communication constraints of Twitter, I might offer a few thoughts.

Since your bio note indicates that you’ve attended Viable Paradise workshop, which is taught by some very skillful editors and writers, I’m going to skip the basics and get to the philosophical.

I think the sort of story you like to write – in which friendships are as important as adventures, and that those adventures can be both large and small – probably lends itself to getting lost in character side plots.  Have you read the National Book award-winning “Penderwick” books by Jean Birdsall?  They’re very much that sort of book.   I love them…

However, readers of SF/F usually expect their adventures to be on a grander scale.  They often expect the characters they read about to be somehow super-powered, whether by means of magic or science.  A wandering side plot about very human issues – no matter how much characterization it offers – is not what they want.  They want – as one (adult by the way) reader admitted to me – to read about people who don’t get messed up by life events the way they themselves do.

So the first question to ask yourself is “Am I writing the right form of fiction?”  Would you be happier writing stories in which character exploration and development is the point, not something that has to compete with defeating dystopian governments or saving the space station or whatever?

The genre you’re writing shapes everything else.  Pretty much the first question any SF/F writer gets asked is “Why do you write ‘that stuff’?”  There are lots of answers – the ability to use the future or an alternate world to explore a social or moral or ethical question.  Because it’s what you like to read.  Because it’s a hot market.

For me, it’s because it’s how my brain works.  Except for occasional short pieces, stories without the speculative fiction element don’t hold my attention.  That, in turn, shapes how I characterize.  I slip inside the person and, while I’m writing in their point of view, I am that person.  Because people rarely go off into side plots that aren’t tied to the issue at hand, my characterization stays tight and yet gets expanded.  If someone remembers an event from the past in any sort of detail, it’s going to be tied to the events of the present moment.

I know a lot of things about my characters that don’t make it onto the page.  This material may never make it onto any page except as notes to myself.  However, I think it’s there in the story nonetheless, keeping my characters three-dimensional, making them react consistently to situations, keeping them from being pawns slid around according to the needs of the plot.

Here’s another question…  Are you sure novels are what you want to write?  Oddly enough, you sound very much like a short story writer (all those side plots) who is forcing herself to write a novel.  Side plots are very different from sub-plots.  Sub-plots exist in tandem with the on-going action.  A good example of this is Elise’s crush on Jet in the early Firekeeper books.  By itself, it would be a pretty slim romance story.  Tied into the novel, however, it helps flesh out the consequences of the competition for King Tedric’s throne, one of which is a girl’s broken heart and her realization that romantic daydreams shouldn’t be used to make major real life choices.

Back in the day, it was more common for writers to explore various aspects of a character or setting in short story format.  These days, too many relatively untried writers push themselves into writing novels.  Maybe you want to write short stories instead – stories about the same people and places, sure.  That’s completely acceptable.

Charles de Lint’s “Newford” stories had all the more punch because he was able to tell so many tales about an interconnected group of friends in a shorter form.  (His Dreams Underfoot is a short story collection that manages to read like a novel.)  David Drake’s Old Nathan is three stories that build on each other, but each stands on its own.  Many an early SF/F novel was actually cobbled together from strong short stories.

Maybe you should consider whether your side plots are really independent short stories.  Don’t weave them in or feel forced to condense them.  Pull them out and find out what the novel really is about.  If it crumples without the side plots, you’ve learned something interesting.

You described yourself as “pantser” as opposed to a plotter.  As I explored in another of these Wanderings, another term for “pantser” is “gardener” – this balanced against “architect,” as a term for those who like to build their stories out in advance.  But I know you’re also a “real” gardener. You know that (no matter what people who don’t garden think) gardens don’t “just grow.”  They need planning, pruning, watering, thinning, fertilizing.

A verbose novel is like an overgrown garden, not really a healthy place.  Consider the shape of your garden.  (Genre.)  The type of your garden.  (Short story.  Novel.)  Then tend appropriately.  You may find your imagination taking a new and wonderful shapes!

Happy Writing!

Jane