Warren Rochelle's Blog - Posts Tagged "chris-howard"
Great Fantasy Roundtable Traveling Guest Blog, January 2013: The Hero and the Quest
Welcome to the January 2013 edition of the Great Fantasy Traveling Roundtable Blog.
This month we are pondering that mainstay of fantasy literature, the Hero and the Quest, with thoughts on unlikely heroes, what a hero is and isn’t, how authors such as Frank Herbert have used this trope, and how we interpreted said Hero and said Quest in our own fiction. Enjoy and reactions and responses are always welcome!
Warren Rochelle
My Heroes
According to the online version of the American Heritage Dictionary, a hero is:
1. In mythology and legend, a man, often of divine ancestry, who is endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated for his bold exploits, and favored by the gods.
2. A person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life: soldiers and nurses who were heroes in an unpopular war.
3. A person noted for special achievement in a particular field: the heroes of medicine.
4. The principal male character in novel, poem, or dramatic presentation.
The word hero should no longer be regarded as restricted to men in the sense [of] “a person noted for courageous action,” though heroine is always restricted to women.
Two of my favorites heroes are Russell and Jeff, who happen to be two of the four protagonists in my novels, Harvest of Changelings (Golden Gryphon Press, 2007, paperback, 2008) and The Called (Golden Gryphon Press, 2010). They are rather unlikely heroes. Briefly, Russell and Jeff are the Fire and Water of their tetrad, their found family. Tetrads are the basic social unit of Faerie, and come in all kinds of gender combinations; their tetrad has three boys and one girl, Hazel, the Earth. Malachi, the other boy, is the Air.
Often there are couples within the tetrad with the couple as primary bond, the tetrad as secondary. Except for Malachi, who is half-fairy, these children are the descendants of changelings left in our universe centuries ago. In Harvest, their long-dormant fairy DNA is awakened and they became to change, and become more magical, acquiring such abilities as flight and glamour-casting. At first they are dealing with these changes alone, then they find each other, and of course, they find themselves fighting Evil, human and otherwise, and on a Quest.
When the reader first meets Russell Avery White he is 12 and in the 5th grade, having had to repeat two grades earlier. The school system has classified him as learning disabled. Red-haired, he has grass-green eyes and is living with his father and pregnant stepmother. His birthmother ran away years ago, taking with her his little brother, and leaving Russell to be verbally and physically abused by his dad. As he tells the other three: “I don’t remember him ever not doing it, now that I think about it” (Harvest 214). Russell’s body and soul are scarred and wounded. He is angry and thinks of himself as dark. He has learned to keep secrets, including his growing awareness of his attraction to boys. He dreams of centaurs—dreams sent by Faerie.
Jeffrey Arthur Gates is 10, a 5th grader and in Russell’s class. He has dark brown hair and sea-green eyes, and suffered “aggravated and protracted sexual abuse” from age 6 to 10. His father was the perpetrator; his mother abandoned him. Like Russell, he has been classified learning disabled. Like Russell he is scarred; Jeff’s are invisible. Now in foster care and fearing returning to his father, Jeff dreams of dragons.
With Malachi, Hazel, they will fight demons, monsters, evil people, as, with the help of Malachi’s father, they search for the gate to Faerie.
In The Called, the two boys, now lovers, are older, emotionally and mentally in their late teens, their physical aging slowed from their years in Faerie. They are called home to Earth to reunite their tetrad, to fight in another war against evil. And they are still haunted by their pasts: the abuse, the pain, and the anger. They are still Outsiders.
They carry no swords or spears. Their births seem ordinary, their rearing, with the abuse, less so. They are called to adventure, to the Quest—but it is more that adventure and the Quest finds them. Helpers, animal and wise souls, yes, and as they encounter evil and discover how to deal with it, they are tried and tested. There are monsters, yes, but the evil is often interior—the shadows of their pasts, and the damaged adults who sort of care for them. Russell’s anger is not easy for Jeff to deal with, no matter how much he comes to love him. Russell’s darkness, his disbelief in his own goodness, is not easy for anyone to deal with. For Jeff, the Somebody in the dark who came for him is still there, a ghost that is always present. They make awful mistakes again and again.
And Russell and Jeff are two of my favorite heroes.
Why?
From pain comes strength? Yes, sometimes, but not always. Pain and anger can break someone; it breaks Russell; Jeff surrenders to it. Perhaps part of the answer can be found in these words by Jane Bowles*: “Your first pain, you carry it with you like a lodestone in your breast because all tenderness will come from there. You must carry it through your whole life but you must not circle around it.” That pain can bring tenderness, is, I would argue, the real source of the strength of my problem children. If they had not suffered and survived and grown from this, Jeff and Russell would have found their
Quest-given tasks far more difficult. As Fred Chappell said in the blurb he wrote for Harvest: “Perhaps a new beatitude is discovered: the broken shall mend the earth.”
But aren’t heroes the characters with whom the reader is to identify? The Hero is the archetype of the Self, right? The Hero and the Quest is the archetypal journey of coming of age (yes, I know it is problematic in its privileging of the public and the masculine)? But are there people who have not been hurt? We all were children once. And surely Heroes are Outsiders. I do identify with these two boys who grow into young men: they are telling part of my own story; they represent parts of my Self.
The potential for heroism is present in all of us. The pain and hurt that comes to us can break us, but it also has the potential for ultimately bringing us greater strength of character and a truer sense of Self.
The Quest is an ongoing journey.
*Jane Bowles, 1917 – 1973, is an American writer and playwright considered by Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Ashbery to be “one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction.” She has “long had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of this century.”
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Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, “The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, 2012).
http://warrenrochelle.com
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Deborah Ross
Hero on a Quest
Once upon a time, a hero represented a very particular character, an archetype if you will. He was invariably male, either a youth or in the prime of life, neither a child nor infirm with age; he was physically powerful and if not morally irreproachable, clearly a “good guy.” It was fine for him to have a flaw or two, so long as it did not interfere with his ability to accomplish great deeds and conquer mighty foes. Occasionally, the flaw would prove his downfall, as in the case of Achilles. The tradition that stretches from Odysseus, Beowulf, and Gilgamesh continued through King Arthur and his knights, to Tarzan, the superheroes of comic books, Doc Savage, and James Bond. True, there were occasional female-heroes in this mold, but mostly they imitated the men, only with brass bikinis, improbably high heels, and better fashion sense. What made them heroic, men and women alike, were physical prowess, lofty ideals, and larger-than-life goals. In other words, they were Worthy of The Noble Quest.
The Quest was always something beyond the reach of the ordinary person. No average plowman or shop-keeper could aspire to find the Grail or slay the dragon. The Quest usually involved what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey,” meaning that the central character must leave behind the familiar, venture into unknown terrain fraught with danger, and then return home. Sometimes he is changed by his experience, sometimes he merely puts himself back on the shelf until the next plea for help.
The function of this kind of Hero is not only as a Campbellian agent – that is, to guide the reader through a transformative journey – but as an agen instrument of Order and of The Triumph of Good. (Notice how the topic lends itself to unnecessary capitalization?) The world has veered toward Chaos, if not actually toppled headlong into the abyss, and the task of the Hero is to set things right. (I suspect that one modern incarnation of the classical Hero is the detective, who restores right social order by solving puzzles that lead to the apprehension of wrong-doers.) One of the implications here is that only those of noble birth, etc., and who are favored by the gods have the capacity to do great deeds. Aforementioned nobles undoubtedly relished stories that demonstrated them how superior they were and didn’t mind the peasantry being reminded of it. This propagated a hierarchical power structure in the same way as did the notion of the divine right of kings. It reinforced the notion that those with political power were inherently better (stronger, luckier, sexier, purer of thought, beloved by the gods) than those who had none.
In an interesting twist, if one wants to praise someone in the People’s Republic of China (or the old Soviet Union), one says he or she is a Hero of the Revolution.
One of the most interesting changes to come about with the development of the novel was the notion that stories about people of ordinary stature and circumstances could be interesting, and that such characters, however humble, might behave in admirable ways. Of course, “ordinary” is in the eye of the beholder and people who were illiterate due to poverty had little opportunity to see themselves in novel characters. Jane Austen wrote about her own fairly comfortable social class, people whose circumstances were familiar to her. One might consider her a Hero of the Novelistic Revolution.
With the shift to non-Heroic characters came the concept of a protagonist – one who acts — rather than a hero, and the blurring of lines between a person who may do extraordinary deeds but is not of the aristocratic, chosen-by-God mode. We might encounter protagonists-of-noble-birth who are heroic in spite of rather than because of their dynastic sociopolitical standing. Eventually, we also had anti-heroes, reluctant heroes, villains-with-hearts-of-gold, and women heroes (to distinguish them from the typical wailing wilting damsel-in-distress heroines). We had central characters who represented ordinary people who rise to extraordinary heights, people that could be you or me. We stopped calling them heroes for a while, but now often do so again.
Sometimes ordinary-people heroes go on quests, sometimes they get dragged kicking and protesting into adventures, and sometimes they simply ache with dreams until they wake up one day and take a small step toward realizing those dreams. In some ways, they carry us with them on their quest more readily because they are more like us. But with the specificity of character comes a different sort of distance from the reader. Many of the old-style Heroes were pretty bland as characters; they didn’t need quirks and failings and insecurities because they were, after all, Heroes. We now appreciate that in the hands of a skillful storyteller, superficial similarities (gender, race, socioeconomic status, nationality) fade in importance compared to the common human experience and aspirations. A sympathetic character trumps one who is “like me.” Added to that is the value placed on diversity and “exoticism” (which is another way of saying, the romantic aspect of strange lands and people).
I wonder if the shift from superhuman/aristocratic Hero to ordinary person acting in heroic ways also reflects a shift in empowerment. Once upon a time, not only could the people who comprised the vast majority of the work force hope to achieve anything notable, they dared not draw attention to themselves. I think now of the people who jump into rivers to save children, or land disabled airplanes under near-impossible circumstances, or place themselves between gunmen and the students in their care (or talk those same gunmen into laying down their weapons). These are true heroes and what they accomplish – often without planning or forethought – may not fulfill the classical definition of a quest. But to the children who are still alive and to everyone who hears these stories and gets tears in their eyes, these spontaneous acts of courage shine all the brighter.
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Deborah J. Ross began writing professionally in 1982 as Deborah Wheeler with Jaydium and Northlight and short stories in Asimov’s, F & SF, Realms Of FantasyY and Star Wars: Tales From Jabba’s Palace. Now under her birth name, Ross, she is continuing the” Darkover” series of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as original work, including the fantasy trilogy The Seven-Petaled Shield, forthcoming from DAW. She is a member of Book View Cafe. She’s lived in France, worked for a cardiologist, studied Hebrew, yoga and kung fu, plays classical piano, loves horses, and is active in the local Jewish and Quaker communities.
http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/
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Chris Howard
Frank Herbert and the Quest without a Hero
Like any writer I have many stylistic influences spanning classical, romantic, and contemporary authors from Homer, Hugo, and Dostoyevsky to Terry Pratchett, Richard Morgan, and Caitlín Kiernan. But if I had to pick an author whose work influenced me to the core–and at a young age–it would be Frank Herbert. For a particular work it would be Dune.
One of the things Dune taught me was that the protagonist of the story can go on the quest, suffer at the hands of an oppressor, struggle through and around the obstacles enemies lay out for him, and he can even complete the quest and emerge victorious. And he can do all of this without being a hero.
Or maybe Paul Atreides was just a different sort of hero, one I had never come across before. With Dune Frank Herbert made me look at heroes and their quests in a different way.
I think many fantasy writers would automatically stick Tolkien on the list, but although I have read the Lord of the Rings dozens of times—and The Silmarillion at least ten—I can’t say Tolkien affected me the same way—or as deeply. Certainly Tolkien showed me the wonder of maps, invented languages, an excitingly deep world, and how a big story—Lord of the Rings—can become just one insignificant fragment of a far longer and more complicated story. These are the things I still love about The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. I probably would have said Tolkien was my favorite author when I was a teenager, but when I hit twenty or so, after four or five readings about Paul Atreides and all the craziness he gets up to with the fremen, I sort of felt like I had graduated from The Lord of the Rings to Dune.
Dune was also exotic, non-traditional. It had European roots without being entirely European, and that drew me in. There was also a very familiar parallel with Paul’s move from Caladan with its broad oceans to the faraway and very different desert world of Arrakis. I had moved around a lot and I thought that gave me insight into Paul’s plight—typical teenager. I was living in Japan, going to high school, when I first read Dune, but I had also lived just outside Paris, and in Idar-Oberstein, Germany. I had been up and down South Korea, Italy, and through East Germany by train to Berlin. I had lived on both American coasts, and I was living in Silicon Valley. In my seventeen- or eighteen- year-old mind there was definitely something that connected the changes shaking up Paul’s life and the constant moving around when I was young.
If the unfamiliar and striking backdrop of Arrakis lured me in first, that was quickly followed by Herbert’s push and play with the concept of a hero. Paul Atreides wasn’t your typical innocent kid with a quest thrust on him, with everything he counted on pulled from under his feet. He wasn’t just a pawn struggling to find his way in a universe of space-folding guild navigators and galactic-scale trade and political manipulation. He was a significant piece in the Bene Gesserit breeding program. He took the terrible risk—basically gambling everything—to gain god-like powers, which he used to gather and train thousands of fanatical soldiers. He defeated the emperor’s forces, killing armies and princes, the whole time maneuvering himself onto the throne, marrying the emperor’s daughter purely for political gain. And he ends the last chapter with less control over his life than when the story started.
Paul was a man playing god,” said Herbert.
That idea hooked me at the first reading—that the hero could take on powers that he would not be able to control, that he could end up flawed so deeply he wasn’t a hero anymore.
None of the main characters in The Lord of the Rings had an evolution like Paul Atreides. Frodo, Aragorn, and the others were heroes in the traditional sense. Even if Frodo didn’t come home whole, he came back a true hero, having lost a finger and defeated the greatest evil of his age. Paul Atreides didn’t come home from his long journey a hero. He was a messiah at the head of a monster of religious ferocity he created. Anything that monster did would be done in his name, and he didn’t really control it.
Then he unleashed it on the universe.
In Herbert’s own words, “The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better to rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes.”
Paul had the quest. He made the journey. He was victorious. There’s a clear apotheosis stage—literally. Paul Atreides is deified. He passes through the stages of the hero’s journey. He just isn’t a hero. Not in the usual sense.
I haven’t read Dune in ten or fifteen years, but I can still feel the affect that book and the following two—Dune Messiah and Children of Dune —had on me. I loved the culture clashing in Dune, the court intrigue, the power and plans of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, the dinner parties with codes and signals and conversations being carried on at several levels at the same time—and only understood by a few. But it was the protagonist wielding power beyond his control that pulled me back into that universe again and again. It was Paul-Muad’Dib driving his followers, his family, the guilds, the Bene Gesserits, and the entire empire toward a doom he could not escape.
That is what has stuck with me to this day. Paul became a model for the kinds of heroes I love to write about. Heroes who barely have the will or personal strength to hold onto the reigns of some monstrous power that is part of them, or that they have created, and sometimes they end up being consumed by it.
In the introduction to his short story collection Eye, Frank Herbert elaborates on this theme. “Dune was aimed at this whole idea of the infallible leader because my view of history says that mistakes made by a leader (or made in a leader’s name) are amplified by the numbers who follow without question. That’s how 900 people wound up in Guyana drinking poison Kool-Aid…”
I don’t know if it’s unusual but I love the idea of a protagonist who isn’t heroic in the traditional sense. I love an unsympathetic hero–or a hero who starts the story without a shared compassion or a strong connection with the reader, and grows to become sympathetic.
On the other hand I also love a good straightforward heroic quest, where the hero is good and right and fights evil. I know Herbert has been taken as being an active opponent of the hero’s journey, the monomyth, the whole Campbell thousand-faced hero, and in the Dune trilogy it looks that way–even with Paul’s progress through the story closely following many of the steps Campbell describes. It’s what Paul ends up becoming that disrupts the structure.
I don’t think Herbert’s in the same camp with David Brin, a confirmed and outspoken adversary of the hero’s journey and the Campbellian insistence that components of the myths are common among most cultures worldwide (Read Brin’s fun and interesting “Star Wars” despots vs. “Star Trek” populists: http://www.salon.com/1999/06/15/brin_...).
Herbert was more of an explorer of conflict and ideas, using his heroes to work through serious flaws in leadership, on the environment and very long range planning, the power of linguistics, and down to challenging what’s considered normal and abnormal. In the Dune books at least, he did not focus on science or future technology. His explorations frequently brought him up against traditional character structure and reader acceptance, but I don’t consider him an enemy of the popular heroic journey and story structure. I consider him a thoughtful science fiction writer who wanted to push the boundaries of the genre in ways that focused on awareness of important issues—ecology, flaws in perception—the infallible leader, and on the dangers of accepting without examination long-held beliefs and cultural fixtures—the hero who completes the quest and returns home a better or at least a more evolved person.
Herbert said, “We tend to tie ourselves down to limited choices. We say, ‘Well, the only answer is….’ or, ‘If you would just. . . .’ Whatever follows these two statements narrows the choices right there. It gets the vision right down close to the ground so that you don’t see anything happening outside. Humans tend not to see over a long range. Now we are required, in these generations, to have a longer range view of what we inflict on the world around us. This is where, I think, science fiction is helping. I don’t think that the mere writing of such a book as Brave New World or 1984 prevents those things which are portrayed in those books from happening. But I do think they alert us to that possibility and make that possibility less likely. They make us aware that we may be going in that direction.”
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Chris Howard is a creative guy with a pen and a paint brush, author of Seaborn (Juno Books) and half a shelf-full of other books. His short stories have appeared in a bunch of zines, latest is “Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archeology” in Fantasy Magazine. In 2007, his story “Hammers and Snails” was a Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Fiction Contest winner. He writes and illustrates the comic, Saltwater Witch. His ink work and digital illos have appeared in Shimmer, BuzzyMag, various RPGs, and on the pages of other books, blogs, and places. Last year he painted a 9 x 12 foot Steampunk Map of New York for a cafe in Brooklyn. Find out everything at http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com
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Carole McDonnell
The hero in stasis
Perhaps it’s the Judeo-Christian virtue of endurance. Perhaps it’s my own life. But my characters have never really wanted to go on a quest. Often they end up on one. Because the genre requires it, because the story requires it. But, for the most part, the quests of my heroes is the quest of a happy home. Home, as they have found it, is a burden to them and they generally want to leave home in order to find or create a better home — far from their own tribe or clan.
I haven’t read up on the hero’s quest in a while so I’m not sure why the hero generally leaves home. Maybe I’ve fallen into the requirements of the trope without knowing. After all, the hero’s quest is such a part of our culture. The prince must depart his land, fight dragons or ogres, marry a woman from another clan, then bring her happily back.
I will say, though, that my characters tend to be heroes of endurance. Whether women or men, they are mired in stasis — usually by well-meaning parents or clans. It is as if, my muses are not so much concerned with the quest but with exploring the brief imprisonment the hero endures. In most fantasy books, the hero has his little encounter with the jail/dungeon/dark prison then he moves on. In my books, the enduring of the dungeon is the entire novel. The hero or heroine is mired in waiting. This waiting involves hope, remorse, existential questions to God, deadly routine, and the determination to hold on to their personality, character, and/or will.
Thus, the quest is to leave the state of being mired and to return to a normalcy the typical hero takes for granted. To merely have a happy home. Perhaps that is why many of my characters are princesses or wives in unhappy marriages or damaged children of kings and warriors. Men and the healthy have a certain freedom that women, the sickly, and young children do not.
There are moments when they seem to have an apparent chance to leave their dungeon —whether by suicide, flight, or concession to the powers that be— but their love for another character, hope in Divine Intervention or a possible change of mind of their prisoner, or a holding on to their will prevents them from leaving. I suspect this kind of hero stasis can only be understand by those readers who, like The Godfather’s Don Corleone, are constantly being reeled back in —-in spite of every attempt to flee the clan.
So my new soon-to-be published novel, The Constant Tower, is not for happy middle class kids who want an adventure in order to grow, but for kids in bad neighborhoods, poor kids who wish to run away from home, kids who don’t want to be in clans, women married into hateful clans. Folks who just want to be happy with the normal. The Christian worldview of battling for a regular life in the face of suffering, sickness, and the fact of others controlling our lives changes the Hero Quest trope a bit — because of that Christian virtue of Endurance.
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Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her first novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower. http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/
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Sylvia Kelso
When is a Quest Not a Quest?
“Quest: a journey towards a goal,” quoth the ubiquitous Wikipedia. “Hero” – one of the few words that descends but doesn’t translate from Classical Greek or Latin. “Heros” in Greek means exactly the same as “hero” in English. Whatever that may be.
The usefully succinct Wikipedia once again:
hero (male) and heroine (female) came to refer to characters who, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, display courage and the will for self sacrifice—that is, heroism—for some greater good of all humanity.
Key-words, courage, philanthropism, self-sacrifice. Says something about the general run of homo sap. sap. that these last two qualities should be the benchmark for heroism, doesn’t it?
Outside literature, heroes don’t need a quest. They can fulfill the Wikipedia criteria without warning or training, on a surf beach, at a bushfire, beside a stormdrain. Inside littracha, everybody from Joseph Campbell up or down has produced endless lists of quest and hero variations. “’Bilbo went to find a treasure, there and back again, but I go to lose one, and not return’” (FOTR, 3 75), says Frodo to Gandalf, in That Book, citing just two possibilities. And every type of hero or quest studs modern fantasy, with the exception of one. The true anti-hero doesn’t appear.
An anti-hero usually loosely means, a hero who doesn’t look heroic: he’s unwilling, or ugly, or cowardly, or immoral. But in fact, a real anti-hero wd. be the opposite of a hero: when the crunch came, instead of fronting up like all the unlikely heroes, from Sam to Beau Mains, the anti-hero would turn and run. And without a hero who can meet the Wikipedia criteria, the whole “heroic” storyline would collapse.
But suppose that even if the hero/es behave/s in good heroic fashion, the Quest turns out not to be a Quest? Does that violate the spirit of both terms?
Quests are trickier than heroes. In littracha, you need them because without a goal, the hero/es’ wanderings wd. degenerate into a picaresque novel, a train of adventures with no coherent end. With a goal, there’s motivation for the story arc. There’s a visible reason to keep going somewhere.
I have done my share of starting-a-book-with-a-Quest, but for some reason the Black Gang, aka the creative part of the writing crew, chose to end my second Amberlight book at the start of a Quest. It was complete with dream omens, the gathering of a company, and an unknown but apparently desperately urgent goal. Deprived of their magic McGuffin at the end of Book 1, the main cast has been struggling to maintain their small Utopian community of Iskarda in the turbulent vacuum left by the fall of the city of Amberlight. At the end of book two, the McGuffin is suddenly restored – but now it’s no longer the basis of their former power, it’s a literal “seed,” powerless to protect even itself.
Only one solution, says their chief strategist. Get it out of here: the River knows it exists, the power-wolves will be after it. So make a public, heavily visible departure in hopes this small indefensible community will be ignored. Take it where? The answer is already supplied, perhaps by the McGuffin itself: the dreams’ goal, the image of a place their own lore identifies as the River’s source.
The novel turned out a two-fold story, told in letters between the chief Quester and her community’s newest foreign member, back in Iskarda. The Quest section proceeded in the proper mode: obstacles, traumas, self-discoveries and harrowing interpersonal conflicts, moments of wrenching loss, exotic new environments, uncovered secrets, and a tail of cataclysmic events, as the McGuffin’s presence disrupted or outright overthrew River states. All kosher by Quest list-rules. The “heroes” also met helpers as well as enemies, they transcended their ordinary selves, their actions were meant to benefit many others. Eventually, they reached the place that had been their goal.
The Questers had come to assume they would find not merely the River’s Source, but a solution to all the problems of a world by then convulsed in war, threatening to destroy Iskarda along with the precious new states founded in the McGuffin’s wake. Whatever it was, the goal would give them the means to save everything.
And it didn’t happen.
The Questers dealt, in some sort, with the shock. They picked themselves up, realized that their world was still dissolving behind them and set off, empty-handed, to fight and if necessary fall with their friends. As they very nearly did. In a sense, the return journey was far more heroic, in the general sense, than the one toward the goal, because unlike Frodo with his treasure lost, the return journey offered only probable immolation for its end.
Of course, this being a fantasy novel, the eucatastrophe that Tolkien first articulated eventually intervened. But the question remains: if the hero goes through the motions of the Quest, heroic and otherwise, but reaches his goal to find it – well, not what he expected – can that journey still be called a quest?
And if it isn’t a quest, though the journey remains motivated, is the goal-seeker a hero, in the most rigid and basic sense? That is, can you have a quest without a hero, even if you do have heroes without a quest?
The Black Gang consider the whole Q and A a critical trivium. Who cares, they say, if it’s “really” a quest or the heroes were “really” heroes? if it looks like a hero, and talks like a hero, and acts like a hero, it’s a hero, isn’t it? And if it looks like a Quest, and sounds like a Quest, and produces a story like a Quest, who cares? Nobody said the goal had to be more than a purpose or an aim. If you want a list-maker’s version, they sniff, then puff out your chest and claim it as the ultimate variation – the Quest that looked like a Quest and sounded like a Quest, and wasn’t technically a Quest at all.
And on this one, I think I’ll let the Black Gang have the final word.
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Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short story, “At Sunset” appears in Luna Station Quarterly for September 2012.
This month we are pondering that mainstay of fantasy literature, the Hero and the Quest, with thoughts on unlikely heroes, what a hero is and isn’t, how authors such as Frank Herbert have used this trope, and how we interpreted said Hero and said Quest in our own fiction. Enjoy and reactions and responses are always welcome!
Warren Rochelle
My Heroes
According to the online version of the American Heritage Dictionary, a hero is:
1. In mythology and legend, a man, often of divine ancestry, who is endowed with great courage and strength, celebrated for his bold exploits, and favored by the gods.
2. A person noted for feats of courage or nobility of purpose, especially one who has risked or sacrificed his or her life: soldiers and nurses who were heroes in an unpopular war.
3. A person noted for special achievement in a particular field: the heroes of medicine.
4. The principal male character in novel, poem, or dramatic presentation.
The word hero should no longer be regarded as restricted to men in the sense [of] “a person noted for courageous action,” though heroine is always restricted to women.
Two of my favorites heroes are Russell and Jeff, who happen to be two of the four protagonists in my novels, Harvest of Changelings (Golden Gryphon Press, 2007, paperback, 2008) and The Called (Golden Gryphon Press, 2010). They are rather unlikely heroes. Briefly, Russell and Jeff are the Fire and Water of their tetrad, their found family. Tetrads are the basic social unit of Faerie, and come in all kinds of gender combinations; their tetrad has three boys and one girl, Hazel, the Earth. Malachi, the other boy, is the Air.
Often there are couples within the tetrad with the couple as primary bond, the tetrad as secondary. Except for Malachi, who is half-fairy, these children are the descendants of changelings left in our universe centuries ago. In Harvest, their long-dormant fairy DNA is awakened and they became to change, and become more magical, acquiring such abilities as flight and glamour-casting. At first they are dealing with these changes alone, then they find each other, and of course, they find themselves fighting Evil, human and otherwise, and on a Quest.
When the reader first meets Russell Avery White he is 12 and in the 5th grade, having had to repeat two grades earlier. The school system has classified him as learning disabled. Red-haired, he has grass-green eyes and is living with his father and pregnant stepmother. His birthmother ran away years ago, taking with her his little brother, and leaving Russell to be verbally and physically abused by his dad. As he tells the other three: “I don’t remember him ever not doing it, now that I think about it” (Harvest 214). Russell’s body and soul are scarred and wounded. He is angry and thinks of himself as dark. He has learned to keep secrets, including his growing awareness of his attraction to boys. He dreams of centaurs—dreams sent by Faerie.
Jeffrey Arthur Gates is 10, a 5th grader and in Russell’s class. He has dark brown hair and sea-green eyes, and suffered “aggravated and protracted sexual abuse” from age 6 to 10. His father was the perpetrator; his mother abandoned him. Like Russell, he has been classified learning disabled. Like Russell he is scarred; Jeff’s are invisible. Now in foster care and fearing returning to his father, Jeff dreams of dragons.
With Malachi, Hazel, they will fight demons, monsters, evil people, as, with the help of Malachi’s father, they search for the gate to Faerie.
In The Called, the two boys, now lovers, are older, emotionally and mentally in their late teens, their physical aging slowed from their years in Faerie. They are called home to Earth to reunite their tetrad, to fight in another war against evil. And they are still haunted by their pasts: the abuse, the pain, and the anger. They are still Outsiders.
They carry no swords or spears. Their births seem ordinary, their rearing, with the abuse, less so. They are called to adventure, to the Quest—but it is more that adventure and the Quest finds them. Helpers, animal and wise souls, yes, and as they encounter evil and discover how to deal with it, they are tried and tested. There are monsters, yes, but the evil is often interior—the shadows of their pasts, and the damaged adults who sort of care for them. Russell’s anger is not easy for Jeff to deal with, no matter how much he comes to love him. Russell’s darkness, his disbelief in his own goodness, is not easy for anyone to deal with. For Jeff, the Somebody in the dark who came for him is still there, a ghost that is always present. They make awful mistakes again and again.
And Russell and Jeff are two of my favorite heroes.
Why?
From pain comes strength? Yes, sometimes, but not always. Pain and anger can break someone; it breaks Russell; Jeff surrenders to it. Perhaps part of the answer can be found in these words by Jane Bowles*: “Your first pain, you carry it with you like a lodestone in your breast because all tenderness will come from there. You must carry it through your whole life but you must not circle around it.” That pain can bring tenderness, is, I would argue, the real source of the strength of my problem children. If they had not suffered and survived and grown from this, Jeff and Russell would have found their
Quest-given tasks far more difficult. As Fred Chappell said in the blurb he wrote for Harvest: “Perhaps a new beatitude is discovered: the broken shall mend the earth.”
But aren’t heroes the characters with whom the reader is to identify? The Hero is the archetype of the Self, right? The Hero and the Quest is the archetypal journey of coming of age (yes, I know it is problematic in its privileging of the public and the masculine)? But are there people who have not been hurt? We all were children once. And surely Heroes are Outsiders. I do identify with these two boys who grow into young men: they are telling part of my own story; they represent parts of my Self.
The potential for heroism is present in all of us. The pain and hurt that comes to us can break us, but it also has the potential for ultimately bringing us greater strength of character and a truer sense of Self.
The Quest is an ongoing journey.
*Jane Bowles, 1917 – 1973, is an American writer and playwright considered by Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, and John Ashbery to be “one of the finest and most underrated writers of American fiction.” She has “long had an underground reputation as one of the truly original writers of this century.”
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Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, “The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published in Queer Fish 2 (Pink Narcissus Press, 2012).
http://warrenrochelle.com
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Deborah Ross
Hero on a Quest
Once upon a time, a hero represented a very particular character, an archetype if you will. He was invariably male, either a youth or in the prime of life, neither a child nor infirm with age; he was physically powerful and if not morally irreproachable, clearly a “good guy.” It was fine for him to have a flaw or two, so long as it did not interfere with his ability to accomplish great deeds and conquer mighty foes. Occasionally, the flaw would prove his downfall, as in the case of Achilles. The tradition that stretches from Odysseus, Beowulf, and Gilgamesh continued through King Arthur and his knights, to Tarzan, the superheroes of comic books, Doc Savage, and James Bond. True, there were occasional female-heroes in this mold, but mostly they imitated the men, only with brass bikinis, improbably high heels, and better fashion sense. What made them heroic, men and women alike, were physical prowess, lofty ideals, and larger-than-life goals. In other words, they were Worthy of The Noble Quest.
The Quest was always something beyond the reach of the ordinary person. No average plowman or shop-keeper could aspire to find the Grail or slay the dragon. The Quest usually involved what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey,” meaning that the central character must leave behind the familiar, venture into unknown terrain fraught with danger, and then return home. Sometimes he is changed by his experience, sometimes he merely puts himself back on the shelf until the next plea for help.
The function of this kind of Hero is not only as a Campbellian agent – that is, to guide the reader through a transformative journey – but as an agen instrument of Order and of The Triumph of Good. (Notice how the topic lends itself to unnecessary capitalization?) The world has veered toward Chaos, if not actually toppled headlong into the abyss, and the task of the Hero is to set things right. (I suspect that one modern incarnation of the classical Hero is the detective, who restores right social order by solving puzzles that lead to the apprehension of wrong-doers.) One of the implications here is that only those of noble birth, etc., and who are favored by the gods have the capacity to do great deeds. Aforementioned nobles undoubtedly relished stories that demonstrated them how superior they were and didn’t mind the peasantry being reminded of it. This propagated a hierarchical power structure in the same way as did the notion of the divine right of kings. It reinforced the notion that those with political power were inherently better (stronger, luckier, sexier, purer of thought, beloved by the gods) than those who had none.
In an interesting twist, if one wants to praise someone in the People’s Republic of China (or the old Soviet Union), one says he or she is a Hero of the Revolution.
One of the most interesting changes to come about with the development of the novel was the notion that stories about people of ordinary stature and circumstances could be interesting, and that such characters, however humble, might behave in admirable ways. Of course, “ordinary” is in the eye of the beholder and people who were illiterate due to poverty had little opportunity to see themselves in novel characters. Jane Austen wrote about her own fairly comfortable social class, people whose circumstances were familiar to her. One might consider her a Hero of the Novelistic Revolution.
With the shift to non-Heroic characters came the concept of a protagonist – one who acts — rather than a hero, and the blurring of lines between a person who may do extraordinary deeds but is not of the aristocratic, chosen-by-God mode. We might encounter protagonists-of-noble-birth who are heroic in spite of rather than because of their dynastic sociopolitical standing. Eventually, we also had anti-heroes, reluctant heroes, villains-with-hearts-of-gold, and women heroes (to distinguish them from the typical wailing wilting damsel-in-distress heroines). We had central characters who represented ordinary people who rise to extraordinary heights, people that could be you or me. We stopped calling them heroes for a while, but now often do so again.
Sometimes ordinary-people heroes go on quests, sometimes they get dragged kicking and protesting into adventures, and sometimes they simply ache with dreams until they wake up one day and take a small step toward realizing those dreams. In some ways, they carry us with them on their quest more readily because they are more like us. But with the specificity of character comes a different sort of distance from the reader. Many of the old-style Heroes were pretty bland as characters; they didn’t need quirks and failings and insecurities because they were, after all, Heroes. We now appreciate that in the hands of a skillful storyteller, superficial similarities (gender, race, socioeconomic status, nationality) fade in importance compared to the common human experience and aspirations. A sympathetic character trumps one who is “like me.” Added to that is the value placed on diversity and “exoticism” (which is another way of saying, the romantic aspect of strange lands and people).
I wonder if the shift from superhuman/aristocratic Hero to ordinary person acting in heroic ways also reflects a shift in empowerment. Once upon a time, not only could the people who comprised the vast majority of the work force hope to achieve anything notable, they dared not draw attention to themselves. I think now of the people who jump into rivers to save children, or land disabled airplanes under near-impossible circumstances, or place themselves between gunmen and the students in their care (or talk those same gunmen into laying down their weapons). These are true heroes and what they accomplish – often without planning or forethought – may not fulfill the classical definition of a quest. But to the children who are still alive and to everyone who hears these stories and gets tears in their eyes, these spontaneous acts of courage shine all the brighter.
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Deborah J. Ross began writing professionally in 1982 as Deborah Wheeler with Jaydium and Northlight and short stories in Asimov’s, F & SF, Realms Of FantasyY and Star Wars: Tales From Jabba’s Palace. Now under her birth name, Ross, she is continuing the” Darkover” series of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as original work, including the fantasy trilogy The Seven-Petaled Shield, forthcoming from DAW. She is a member of Book View Cafe. She’s lived in France, worked for a cardiologist, studied Hebrew, yoga and kung fu, plays classical piano, loves horses, and is active in the local Jewish and Quaker communities.
http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/
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Chris Howard
Frank Herbert and the Quest without a Hero
Like any writer I have many stylistic influences spanning classical, romantic, and contemporary authors from Homer, Hugo, and Dostoyevsky to Terry Pratchett, Richard Morgan, and Caitlín Kiernan. But if I had to pick an author whose work influenced me to the core–and at a young age–it would be Frank Herbert. For a particular work it would be Dune.
One of the things Dune taught me was that the protagonist of the story can go on the quest, suffer at the hands of an oppressor, struggle through and around the obstacles enemies lay out for him, and he can even complete the quest and emerge victorious. And he can do all of this without being a hero.
Or maybe Paul Atreides was just a different sort of hero, one I had never come across before. With Dune Frank Herbert made me look at heroes and their quests in a different way.
I think many fantasy writers would automatically stick Tolkien on the list, but although I have read the Lord of the Rings dozens of times—and The Silmarillion at least ten—I can’t say Tolkien affected me the same way—or as deeply. Certainly Tolkien showed me the wonder of maps, invented languages, an excitingly deep world, and how a big story—Lord of the Rings—can become just one insignificant fragment of a far longer and more complicated story. These are the things I still love about The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion. I probably would have said Tolkien was my favorite author when I was a teenager, but when I hit twenty or so, after four or five readings about Paul Atreides and all the craziness he gets up to with the fremen, I sort of felt like I had graduated from The Lord of the Rings to Dune.
Dune was also exotic, non-traditional. It had European roots without being entirely European, and that drew me in. There was also a very familiar parallel with Paul’s move from Caladan with its broad oceans to the faraway and very different desert world of Arrakis. I had moved around a lot and I thought that gave me insight into Paul’s plight—typical teenager. I was living in Japan, going to high school, when I first read Dune, but I had also lived just outside Paris, and in Idar-Oberstein, Germany. I had been up and down South Korea, Italy, and through East Germany by train to Berlin. I had lived on both American coasts, and I was living in Silicon Valley. In my seventeen- or eighteen- year-old mind there was definitely something that connected the changes shaking up Paul’s life and the constant moving around when I was young.
If the unfamiliar and striking backdrop of Arrakis lured me in first, that was quickly followed by Herbert’s push and play with the concept of a hero. Paul Atreides wasn’t your typical innocent kid with a quest thrust on him, with everything he counted on pulled from under his feet. He wasn’t just a pawn struggling to find his way in a universe of space-folding guild navigators and galactic-scale trade and political manipulation. He was a significant piece in the Bene Gesserit breeding program. He took the terrible risk—basically gambling everything—to gain god-like powers, which he used to gather and train thousands of fanatical soldiers. He defeated the emperor’s forces, killing armies and princes, the whole time maneuvering himself onto the throne, marrying the emperor’s daughter purely for political gain. And he ends the last chapter with less control over his life than when the story started.
Paul was a man playing god,” said Herbert.
That idea hooked me at the first reading—that the hero could take on powers that he would not be able to control, that he could end up flawed so deeply he wasn’t a hero anymore.
None of the main characters in The Lord of the Rings had an evolution like Paul Atreides. Frodo, Aragorn, and the others were heroes in the traditional sense. Even if Frodo didn’t come home whole, he came back a true hero, having lost a finger and defeated the greatest evil of his age. Paul Atreides didn’t come home from his long journey a hero. He was a messiah at the head of a monster of religious ferocity he created. Anything that monster did would be done in his name, and he didn’t really control it.
Then he unleashed it on the universe.
In Herbert’s own words, “The bottom line of the Dune trilogy is: beware of heroes. Much better to rely on your own judgment, and your own mistakes.”
Paul had the quest. He made the journey. He was victorious. There’s a clear apotheosis stage—literally. Paul Atreides is deified. He passes through the stages of the hero’s journey. He just isn’t a hero. Not in the usual sense.
I haven’t read Dune in ten or fifteen years, but I can still feel the affect that book and the following two—Dune Messiah and Children of Dune —had on me. I loved the culture clashing in Dune, the court intrigue, the power and plans of the Bene Gesserit sisterhood, the dinner parties with codes and signals and conversations being carried on at several levels at the same time—and only understood by a few. But it was the protagonist wielding power beyond his control that pulled me back into that universe again and again. It was Paul-Muad’Dib driving his followers, his family, the guilds, the Bene Gesserits, and the entire empire toward a doom he could not escape.
That is what has stuck with me to this day. Paul became a model for the kinds of heroes I love to write about. Heroes who barely have the will or personal strength to hold onto the reigns of some monstrous power that is part of them, or that they have created, and sometimes they end up being consumed by it.
In the introduction to his short story collection Eye, Frank Herbert elaborates on this theme. “Dune was aimed at this whole idea of the infallible leader because my view of history says that mistakes made by a leader (or made in a leader’s name) are amplified by the numbers who follow without question. That’s how 900 people wound up in Guyana drinking poison Kool-Aid…”
I don’t know if it’s unusual but I love the idea of a protagonist who isn’t heroic in the traditional sense. I love an unsympathetic hero–or a hero who starts the story without a shared compassion or a strong connection with the reader, and grows to become sympathetic.
On the other hand I also love a good straightforward heroic quest, where the hero is good and right and fights evil. I know Herbert has been taken as being an active opponent of the hero’s journey, the monomyth, the whole Campbell thousand-faced hero, and in the Dune trilogy it looks that way–even with Paul’s progress through the story closely following many of the steps Campbell describes. It’s what Paul ends up becoming that disrupts the structure.
I don’t think Herbert’s in the same camp with David Brin, a confirmed and outspoken adversary of the hero’s journey and the Campbellian insistence that components of the myths are common among most cultures worldwide (Read Brin’s fun and interesting “Star Wars” despots vs. “Star Trek” populists: http://www.salon.com/1999/06/15/brin_...).
Herbert was more of an explorer of conflict and ideas, using his heroes to work through serious flaws in leadership, on the environment and very long range planning, the power of linguistics, and down to challenging what’s considered normal and abnormal. In the Dune books at least, he did not focus on science or future technology. His explorations frequently brought him up against traditional character structure and reader acceptance, but I don’t consider him an enemy of the popular heroic journey and story structure. I consider him a thoughtful science fiction writer who wanted to push the boundaries of the genre in ways that focused on awareness of important issues—ecology, flaws in perception—the infallible leader, and on the dangers of accepting without examination long-held beliefs and cultural fixtures—the hero who completes the quest and returns home a better or at least a more evolved person.
Herbert said, “We tend to tie ourselves down to limited choices. We say, ‘Well, the only answer is….’ or, ‘If you would just. . . .’ Whatever follows these two statements narrows the choices right there. It gets the vision right down close to the ground so that you don’t see anything happening outside. Humans tend not to see over a long range. Now we are required, in these generations, to have a longer range view of what we inflict on the world around us. This is where, I think, science fiction is helping. I don’t think that the mere writing of such a book as Brave New World or 1984 prevents those things which are portrayed in those books from happening. But I do think they alert us to that possibility and make that possibility less likely. They make us aware that we may be going in that direction.”
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Chris Howard is a creative guy with a pen and a paint brush, author of Seaborn (Juno Books) and half a shelf-full of other books. His short stories have appeared in a bunch of zines, latest is “Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archeology” in Fantasy Magazine. In 2007, his story “Hammers and Snails” was a Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Fiction Contest winner. He writes and illustrates the comic, Saltwater Witch. His ink work and digital illos have appeared in Shimmer, BuzzyMag, various RPGs, and on the pages of other books, blogs, and places. Last year he painted a 9 x 12 foot Steampunk Map of New York for a cafe in Brooklyn. Find out everything at http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com
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Carole McDonnell
The hero in stasis
Perhaps it’s the Judeo-Christian virtue of endurance. Perhaps it’s my own life. But my characters have never really wanted to go on a quest. Often they end up on one. Because the genre requires it, because the story requires it. But, for the most part, the quests of my heroes is the quest of a happy home. Home, as they have found it, is a burden to them and they generally want to leave home in order to find or create a better home — far from their own tribe or clan.
I haven’t read up on the hero’s quest in a while so I’m not sure why the hero generally leaves home. Maybe I’ve fallen into the requirements of the trope without knowing. After all, the hero’s quest is such a part of our culture. The prince must depart his land, fight dragons or ogres, marry a woman from another clan, then bring her happily back.
I will say, though, that my characters tend to be heroes of endurance. Whether women or men, they are mired in stasis — usually by well-meaning parents or clans. It is as if, my muses are not so much concerned with the quest but with exploring the brief imprisonment the hero endures. In most fantasy books, the hero has his little encounter with the jail/dungeon/dark prison then he moves on. In my books, the enduring of the dungeon is the entire novel. The hero or heroine is mired in waiting. This waiting involves hope, remorse, existential questions to God, deadly routine, and the determination to hold on to their personality, character, and/or will.
Thus, the quest is to leave the state of being mired and to return to a normalcy the typical hero takes for granted. To merely have a happy home. Perhaps that is why many of my characters are princesses or wives in unhappy marriages or damaged children of kings and warriors. Men and the healthy have a certain freedom that women, the sickly, and young children do not.
There are moments when they seem to have an apparent chance to leave their dungeon —whether by suicide, flight, or concession to the powers that be— but their love for another character, hope in Divine Intervention or a possible change of mind of their prisoner, or a holding on to their will prevents them from leaving. I suspect this kind of hero stasis can only be understand by those readers who, like The Godfather’s Don Corleone, are constantly being reeled back in —-in spite of every attempt to flee the clan.
So my new soon-to-be published novel, The Constant Tower, is not for happy middle class kids who want an adventure in order to grow, but for kids in bad neighborhoods, poor kids who wish to run away from home, kids who don’t want to be in clans, women married into hateful clans. Folks who just want to be happy with the normal. The Christian worldview of battling for a regular life in the face of suffering, sickness, and the fact of others controlling our lives changes the Hero Quest trope a bit — because of that Christian virtue of Endurance.
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Carole McDonnell is a writer of ethnic fiction, speculative fiction, and Christian fiction. Her works have appeared in many anthologies and at various online sites. Her first novel, Wind Follower, was published by Wildside Books. Her forthcoming novel is called The Constant Tower. http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/
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Sylvia Kelso
When is a Quest Not a Quest?
“Quest: a journey towards a goal,” quoth the ubiquitous Wikipedia. “Hero” – one of the few words that descends but doesn’t translate from Classical Greek or Latin. “Heros” in Greek means exactly the same as “hero” in English. Whatever that may be.
The usefully succinct Wikipedia once again:
hero (male) and heroine (female) came to refer to characters who, in the face of danger and adversity or from a position of weakness, display courage and the will for self sacrifice—that is, heroism—for some greater good of all humanity.
Key-words, courage, philanthropism, self-sacrifice. Says something about the general run of homo sap. sap. that these last two qualities should be the benchmark for heroism, doesn’t it?
Outside literature, heroes don’t need a quest. They can fulfill the Wikipedia criteria without warning or training, on a surf beach, at a bushfire, beside a stormdrain. Inside littracha, everybody from Joseph Campbell up or down has produced endless lists of quest and hero variations. “’Bilbo went to find a treasure, there and back again, but I go to lose one, and not return’” (FOTR, 3 75), says Frodo to Gandalf, in That Book, citing just two possibilities. And every type of hero or quest studs modern fantasy, with the exception of one. The true anti-hero doesn’t appear.
An anti-hero usually loosely means, a hero who doesn’t look heroic: he’s unwilling, or ugly, or cowardly, or immoral. But in fact, a real anti-hero wd. be the opposite of a hero: when the crunch came, instead of fronting up like all the unlikely heroes, from Sam to Beau Mains, the anti-hero would turn and run. And without a hero who can meet the Wikipedia criteria, the whole “heroic” storyline would collapse.
But suppose that even if the hero/es behave/s in good heroic fashion, the Quest turns out not to be a Quest? Does that violate the spirit of both terms?
Quests are trickier than heroes. In littracha, you need them because without a goal, the hero/es’ wanderings wd. degenerate into a picaresque novel, a train of adventures with no coherent end. With a goal, there’s motivation for the story arc. There’s a visible reason to keep going somewhere.
I have done my share of starting-a-book-with-a-Quest, but for some reason the Black Gang, aka the creative part of the writing crew, chose to end my second Amberlight book at the start of a Quest. It was complete with dream omens, the gathering of a company, and an unknown but apparently desperately urgent goal. Deprived of their magic McGuffin at the end of Book 1, the main cast has been struggling to maintain their small Utopian community of Iskarda in the turbulent vacuum left by the fall of the city of Amberlight. At the end of book two, the McGuffin is suddenly restored – but now it’s no longer the basis of their former power, it’s a literal “seed,” powerless to protect even itself.
Only one solution, says their chief strategist. Get it out of here: the River knows it exists, the power-wolves will be after it. So make a public, heavily visible departure in hopes this small indefensible community will be ignored. Take it where? The answer is already supplied, perhaps by the McGuffin itself: the dreams’ goal, the image of a place their own lore identifies as the River’s source.
The novel turned out a two-fold story, told in letters between the chief Quester and her community’s newest foreign member, back in Iskarda. The Quest section proceeded in the proper mode: obstacles, traumas, self-discoveries and harrowing interpersonal conflicts, moments of wrenching loss, exotic new environments, uncovered secrets, and a tail of cataclysmic events, as the McGuffin’s presence disrupted or outright overthrew River states. All kosher by Quest list-rules. The “heroes” also met helpers as well as enemies, they transcended their ordinary selves, their actions were meant to benefit many others. Eventually, they reached the place that had been their goal.
The Questers had come to assume they would find not merely the River’s Source, but a solution to all the problems of a world by then convulsed in war, threatening to destroy Iskarda along with the precious new states founded in the McGuffin’s wake. Whatever it was, the goal would give them the means to save everything.
And it didn’t happen.
The Questers dealt, in some sort, with the shock. They picked themselves up, realized that their world was still dissolving behind them and set off, empty-handed, to fight and if necessary fall with their friends. As they very nearly did. In a sense, the return journey was far more heroic, in the general sense, than the one toward the goal, because unlike Frodo with his treasure lost, the return journey offered only probable immolation for its end.
Of course, this being a fantasy novel, the eucatastrophe that Tolkien first articulated eventually intervened. But the question remains: if the hero goes through the motions of the Quest, heroic and otherwise, but reaches his goal to find it – well, not what he expected – can that journey still be called a quest?
And if it isn’t a quest, though the journey remains motivated, is the goal-seeker a hero, in the most rigid and basic sense? That is, can you have a quest without a hero, even if you do have heroes without a quest?
The Black Gang consider the whole Q and A a critical trivium. Who cares, they say, if it’s “really” a quest or the heroes were “really” heroes? if it looks like a hero, and talks like a hero, and acts like a hero, it’s a hero, isn’t it? And if it looks like a Quest, and sounds like a Quest, and produces a story like a Quest, who cares? Nobody said the goal had to be more than a purpose or an aim. If you want a list-maker’s version, they sniff, then puff out your chest and claim it as the ultimate variation – the Quest that looked like a Quest and sounded like a Quest, and wasn’t technically a Quest at all.
And on this one, I think I’ll let the Black Gang have the final word.
* * * * *
Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia, and writes fantasy and SF set mostly in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some stories in Australian and US anthologies. Her latest short story, “At Sunset” appears in Luna Station Quarterly for September 2012.
Disabilities in Fantasy: March 2013 Traveling Fantasy Blog Roundtable
Travelling Fantasy Blog Tour: Disabilities and Fantasy
This month our travelling fantasy blog tour deals with disabilities in fantasy.
Disabilities in Fantasy
As we know, disabilities come in all kinds. Mental, physical, emotional.
One of the problem with creating/defining a disabled character is deciding how restricted one's character will be. A character who is utterly unable to move will not be available for derring-do unless his mental/dream world is being explored or unless he lives in a world that allows for his mind and heart are able to affect people and situations. This kind of utterly disabled character could be asleep, in a coma, in cryo-sleep or even dead. However, for the most part, a disabled character generally is able to move around.
There are also disabled characters who are not really disabled. This often happens in sci-fi where technology is so advanced that a disability hardly matters anymore. There are also stories where disabilities are considered romantic -- the odd eye-patch, a blind character such as Star Trek's Geordie who seems more hip than challenged (It's the future, after all!) or a character with an attractive limp. Consider the movie, Avatar, where for all intents and purposes, the hero's disability doesn't matter to the extent that it should, and his being helped by a female of a lower/different class feels a bit like Mr Rochester being helped by Jane Eyre. Whatever the effect, the film's creators can preserve their cake and eat it simultaneously. In some fantasies, as in the Drakengard video games, often some exchange is made between the disabled and some other entity which renders the disability useful in some ways. For instance, Caim gives up his voice to bond with his Dragon. It's a loss but it's also a gain.
There is also the situation where a disability is not seen -- by the disabled character, by fellow characters, by the audience, or by the reader as a disability. This can be good, bad, idealized, or romanticized. In the original Star Trek, the Vulcan Spock (and many of the so-called advanced cultures) are idealized because of their inability to feel emotions. There is also a disability which is a kind of living death, a character who has some kind of debilitating ever-worsening illness which makes them continually at war with their bodies, for instance, "The Incredible Shrinking Man."
Whether mentally, intellectually, or physically disabled, a character with a disability is also affected spiritually. They are "marked" in some way that makes them view the world a little differently than others in their world.
Because of my health issues and my son's, I have become very interested in abilities, afflictions, infirmities, and disabilities. I try to see how being disabled can be strengthening to the human soul and how it opens the eyes to situations the able-bodied do not see. I don't think one has had to suffer in order to have one's eyes open to the world but I think it helps. For me, a disabled hero (with a true disability) is an excellent character. I will admit that I often write about disabled characters as a kind of catharsis, or to show the able-bodied how difficult life is for the sickly. But I also write about disabled characters because they populate the world I live in -- especially with the rise of autism in the US population) and they rarely show up as heroes in fantasies. . I feel we ought to show the lives of all kinds of people that disabled people and the "unseen" can see themselves in literature, and that others can see them as well.
In my short story, Lingua Franca, the inhabitants of a far-off planet do not consider themselves disabled. In my novel, Wind Follower, the main character is so ashamed of his disability (epilepsy) that all around him pretend not to see it in order to spare him from shame. There is also an autistic learning disabled character who -- although she is almost an old woman-- is a playmate of the main character. In my novel, Constant Tower, disabled boys born in the Wheel Clan are either killed or made into "living ghosts" called studiers, who are made to feel grateful because they have been spared death. -- Carole McDonnell
Difference and Ability in F&SF
Chris Howard
I spent some time thinking about this month's roundtable topic, disability in fantasy (and SF), building a list of characters I can remember from the literature as well characters in my own books that come to the story with physical or mental differences--differences that force the character down less certain paths or put boundaries on action, sometimes painful boundaries.
I started out with the idea this was going to be difficult, that disabilities in fantasy and science fiction were poorly represented, but hoping that was just my own limited scope of reading, and the lack of differently-abled characters was not pervasive. I think, it turns out, I was partially correct, that there aren’t many examples, but there are significant ones—just from the books I have read. Many more from books I have yet to read.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan, born with significant physical impairments, came immediately to mind. (Bujold has characters with disabilities in several books). Michael Moorcock’s Elric was another, although it’s been decades since I’ve read the stories. William Gibson has several stories containing characters with prostheses, or characters who are wheelchair-bound. There are also a few Tim Powers books, but the one that comes to mind is The Stress of Her Regard, in which the main character, a physician, lives with physical and mental disabilities, as well as other characters with prosthetic eyes and missing limbs. (I did google around after writing this post, and found the "Decloaking Disability Bibliography", a fairly long list of authors with books that attempt "to explore the intersection of disability and technology within texts from the genres of science fiction and the literature of the fantastic." It’s an impressive list, and just shows that I need to find more time to read. Link below).
As my kids have moved through the teenage years I’ve read more and more YA lit, and my impression is there’s some real focus on disabilities there, characters with paralysis, speech limitations, bulimia, dyslexia, Tourette’s syndrome. Most of these aren’t in fantasy or SF books, but in stories that focus on characters struggling to cope with differences in a social context, characters breaking free of walls they have put up themselves, or that society has constructed to hold them back.
This month’s topic also made me look critically at my own work. I do have a few characters with limited or missing senses and limbs (Emandes in Sea Throne, Corina in Seaborn who has lost the complete control of her body), but not that many. I have written several books with main characters who struggle continuously against mental limitations or differences—Kassandra in Saltwater Witch, Thea in Dryad. Internal struggles form the basis for my favorite kinds of characters. This month’s topic put the focus on an important missing element in my reading as well as my writing.
Finally, there’s an interesting recent example—a recent read for me anyway—in Joe Abercrombie’s character Monzcarro “Monza” Murcatto, who begins the first page of Best Served Cold as the ruthlessly competent fighter and captain of Styria’s most feared mercenaries, but by the end of chapter one she’s mercilessly killed and thrown off the battlements into a ravine. Duke Orzo, who commands and orchestrates the whole thing, can wipe his hands and go about his continued political maneuvering with his greatest military threat broken and lying in her own blood below his castle, dead.
Almost.
Monza, it turns out, is only mostly dead. She’s picked up—almost in pieces—by a mysterious stranger and nursed back to a damaged but still breathing version of her old self. As you can guess by the book’s title, she sets out to destroy everyone involved in her “death”. I won’t be giving anything away in saying I think she does okay.
Decloaking Disability Bibliography
http://www.panix.com/~kestrell/Decloa...
Chris Howard is a creative guy with a pen and a paint brush, author of Seaborn (Juno Books), Salvage (Masque/Prime, 2013), and a shelf-full of other books. His short stories have appeared in a bunch of zines, latest is “Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archeology” in Fantasy Magazine. His story “Hammers and Snails” was a Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Fiction Contest winner. He writes and illustrates the comic, Saltwater Witch. His ink work and digital illos have appeared in Shimmer, BuzzyMag, various RPGs, and on the pages and covers of books, blogs, and other interesting places. Last year he painted a 9 x 12 foot Steampunk Map of New York for a cafe in Brooklyn. Find out everything at http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com
The Abilities of Disability – at Least in Fantasy
In real life, disability is exactly what it says. A lack. A limitation. A loss of possibilities open to others, whether to see, to hear, to walk, to run, or just to go a week without the black dog of depression dropping on your back to take the taste out of everything.
Atop the inner physical limitations, come external ones: doors too narrow for a wheelchair, handles too high to reach, prompts or safety signals only visible, or only audible. A flight of “simple” stairs. Even an escalator can be another infuriating check to someone with a “disability.”
Add on the invisible limits: as with race, class, and colour, even heterosexuality, disability can leave a person either Othered or literally invisible. Even when visible, the unlucky Other has to run the gauntlet, if not of naming for the problem – right up or down to names like Hopaling Cassidy – then of the other egregious reactions, from pity to repulsion: less happily than Hopalong, the person vanishes behind the stereotype.
In fantasy, as with race, class and colour etc., things could, even ought to be different. Alas, a quick mental survey of Fantasy I Have Read matches too well with the real-world social map: blind seers or crippled beggars appear quite often among minor or even lesser characters. I can recall only one high-to-mid-level blind character, the bard in Tanya Huff’s Four Quarters series, who is definitely and encouragingly NOT disabled by his blindness and indeed, in the first book, plays a crucial climactic role.
Again, in The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner offers a powerful cameo of her previous lead character, the great swordsman Richard St. Vier, now suffering from loss of all but peripheral vision, yet devising his own remedies, to remain a swordmaster unparalleled.
Barbara Hambly has two main male characters, wizards whose magic is off-set by poor vision. One is Antryg Windrose, her most notable wizard, and perhaps my favourite among wizards, Gandalf included. Antryg’s myopia is definitely not “disabling” – though his ability to practice martial arts without his glasses does stretch my credibility – it is only one in a bouquet of anti-establishment attributes. Antryg comes from a dirt-poor tundra family, he learnt his arts from the series’ main villain, and he is more gloriously dotty than even T. H. White’s Merlin, even Antryg frequently considering himself to be outright mad.
There is no deaf, blind, and certainly no paraplegic or quadriplegic main character or protagonist in any fantasy I can think of (and don’t mention Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan, his universe is unequivocally SF.) Does this mean mainstream fantasy is as exclusive of the disabled as of non-WASP, middleclass, heterosexual protagonists?
There is some justification, on narrative grounds. Fantasy is, after all, an adventure genre. Protagonists have to be equally fit for flight or fight, accustomed or at least able to confront dragons and scale castles at a blink. As Hambly’s Californian geek computer programmer ponders at one point in the Windrose series, after three days spent on the run, or the walk, in a pre-Industrial countryside, eating bread and cheese and sleeping in haystacks: “Thank God I don’t have allergies – that’s probably something selected against in the evolution of heroines.” (Silent Tower 179.) And so are blindness, deafness, and of course, any form of wheelchair limitation. Disabilities just make things too difficult for the writer, you see?
But should they? Try telling anyone that Long John Silver’s wooden leg limited Treasure Island in any way, adventures included. Come to that, does lameness limit Hopalong Cassidy? Sure, it would probably bring an appreciable change if Long John had needed to push a wheelchair over Hispaniola, but otherwise?
In fact, for a writer, disability should present not a limit but a valuable asset, especially in building characters. And by this I don’t mean simply turning the “disabled” to an Other of terror and nightmare, as Long John Silver becomes. Without going completely Pollyanna, I consider disability in a main character will give a writer not just means to individualize him/her, but to strengthen that character morally, emotionally, and what matters most to a writer, charismatically.
I can say this from experience: in the third Amberlight book, Source, I invented an imperial heir, known as a crown prince, with a “delicate stomach,” that could be upset without warning or rule by certain foods. (Art again anticipating nature, I later found one of my own friends actually has this problem.) At the time, this was just an individuating quirk in a mid-range character. But Therkon went on to become the male lead in the fourth, (unpublished) book, Dragonfly, and there I was charmed to find his stomach upsets did not merely show Men under Pressure Behaving Well, but could actually function as part of the plot. Not merely to hamper the action at crisis but to advance the emotional plot (love-story, okay?) and, in one case, to help hero and heroine out of a tight corner as well.
Again, though I can’t recall a fantasy hero with a mental disability, (there are a few in SF), I managed to produce one who could suffer from clinical depression. Also unpublished as yet, The Heart of the Fire was meant as my version of the super swordsman: silent, deadly, impregnable to all finer feelings. Unfortunately, by Chapter 2 his workname had become The Killer Caramel, since he had developed an incurable weakness for fostering orphan calves.
Later more lethal character flaws surfaced: at life crises he would drink himself, not into mere alcoholism, but to a hair-trigger readiness to take offense, and his case, kill someone. Or someones. Later, he would sink into life-threatening lethargy. Only after four books and buckets of wonderfully dramatic angst did his life even out to a point where these phases finally faded away.
Such “cures” are less available in reality. But as a writer, I have found disability, at least of a “minor” variety, a powerful and fertile trope. Ironically, at least to a writer, “disability” should be considered less a limitation than a valued basis on which to build a strong, dramatic, even charismatic hero/ine. And what writer would consider one of those a disability?
Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some short stories in Australian and US anthologies.
This was first posted at:
http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/2...
Disabilities and the Fantastic
In Irish mythology, only a king without imperfections could sit on the throne. According to The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore (Checkmark Books, 2004) “a king could only claim the goddess of the land as his wife—and through her, sovereignty of the country—if he were whole and without blemish. If injured he was forced to abdicate the throne” (49). So it was for Nuada, who lost his hand or arm in battle, and had it replaced with a silver one (thus becoming Nuada of the Silver Hand). This injury meant he had to give up his leadership of the Tuatha Dé Danaan.1 Only when he is given a magical prosthesis is he allowed to return to the throne. His silver hand is not enough; it has to be covered by a special skin to appear normal (362).
Nuada lost his throne, thanks to prejudice against the disabled. That he did is indicative of attitudes which suggest that those who are not “whole” are no longer capable, and that their disability somehow hurts others, in this case, the people he ruled. Nuada was still able to fight with his silver appendage, but that wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t whole; he couldn’t be king.
Tiny Tim, in A Christmas Carol, is another disabled character in fantastic literature. His lonely crutches in the corner, carefully preserved, are a familiar image to many readers. If he is not treated, death is his future—and it is only through the repentance of Scrooge’s evil ways that Tiny Tim can receive the medical care he needs. Unlike Nuada, who experiences prejudice, Tim is accepted and loved by his family. But it could be argued that Dickens is exhibiting prejudice against the disabled, as he isn’t a fully realized character; rather he is a symbol of repentance and redemption, an image of pity, and not a little boy who happens to have a disability.
So, what is going on with the presentations of the disabled, of disabilities in the fantastic? Surely, there are characters who are more than just victims of prejudice and pathetic imagery? My (admittedly unscientific and indeed casual) research for this blog took me to The Passive Voice website (http://www.thepassivevoice.com/09/201...), and “10 Inspirational Disabled Characters from Sci-Fi and Fantasy.” Tyrion Lannister, from Game of Thrones, immediately got my attention. Yes, as Passive Guy says, “The insults thrown at Tyrion Lannister in both the books and the TV show Game Of Thrones are, sadly, a reflection of what many dwarfs in our real world have to go through (although Tyrion, being a contrary sort, takes one of these insults – “Imp” – and makes it his own).” But he is presented as a “fantastic character first, a dwarf second . . .Of course his size is an important part of what makes him Tyrion, but he’s so much more: clever, sardonic, scheming, sexy and vulnerable. Tyrion is not “just” a dwarf: he’s one of the best characters on TV right now.”
Another character I found intriguing was Toothless, from How to Train Your Dragon. He has a damaged tail, which dooms him to being flightless, and thus, probably to death. Young Viking Hiccup, however, makes him a prosthetic tail (perhaps the “first dragon-limb-replacement”) and he takes wing. According to Passive Guy, Toothless is a “great example to set kids who might never have thought about what it means to need a prosthesis.”
All right, so far, so good. Better, yes? Well, not according to one commentator, Steve Godden, who felt the entire list bordered patronizing, and borderline insensitive. Must the disabled be inspirational and good examples? Can’t they just be a dragon who needs a tail, or a prince who happens to be a dwarf? Godden found this list to be “[offputting sic] as characters are being defined by their disabilities, and therefore not as whole people. He notes that the “One of the things the athletes at the para-Olympics requested is that the term ‘inspiring’ should not be used.” As he further notes, “Characters are only ‘inspiring’ if they stoically accept their disability.” However, another commentator, Mira, brings up the question of intent. Why are these characters in the story at all? It is important, she argues, that the disabled be seen, and not hidden away or (often literally) looked over. According to Mira, “. . . sometimes those in a targeted community sometimes get too caught up in political correctness, and forget intent. Sensitivity is important, for sure, but sometimes there are positive things happening even if they are not 100% sensitive.”
True and Godden agrees: “Representation is important, I just wish we had reached a place where there was no need to represent because it was no longer an issue.” But we will always have the disabled, whether due to genetics or an accident or disease. The place we need to reach is one in which there is no longer discrimination against the disabled, and they are considered whole people, and not a disability, or inspiring examples.
In the interest of full disclosure (and shameless self-promotion) two of my main characters in Harvest of Changelings and The Called, Russell and Jeff have learning disabilities, a legacy from their fairy heritage. I remember being quite aware of not making them an image but fully realized people who are, among a long list of adjectives, also learning disabled. I hope I succeeded; that was my intent.
So, there has been progress from Nuada’s disguised hand and Tiny Tim’s presentation as an image and not a boy who is disabled. A bad-ass prince, a dragon, and two boys who help save the world. They are real, visible, and certainly not stoic and they are certainly more than their disability: they are heroes.
Let’s keep on until we reach the place where the disabled are just there, among the rest of us—all part of the human rainbow—including disabled villains.
Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short fiction has appeared in such journals and publications as Icarus, Collective Fallout, North Carolina Literary Review, and The Silver Gryphon. His story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was recently published in Queer Fish 2.
1 The Tuatha Dé Danann ("peoples of the goddess Danu), are a race of people in Irish mythology. In the invasions tradition, they are the fifth group to settle Ireland. The Tuatha Dé Danann are thought to derive from the pre-Christian deities of Ireland. When the surviving stories were written, Ireland had been Christian for centuries, and the Tuatha Dé were represented as mortal kings, queens and heroes of the distant past; however there are many clues to their former divine status. A poem in the Book of Leinster lists many of them, but ends "Although [the author] enumerates them, he does not worship them." Goibniu, Creidhne and Luchta are referred to as Trí Dé Dána ("three gods of craftsmanship"), and the Dagda’s name is interpreted in medieval texts as "the good god." Even after they are displaced as the rulers of Ireland, characters such as Lugh, the Morrígan, Aengus and Manannán mac Lir appear in stories set centuries later, showing all the signs of immortality (Wikipedia contributors. "Tuatha Dé Danann." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 22 Feb. 2013. Web. 19 Mar. 2013).
This month our travelling fantasy blog tour deals with disabilities in fantasy.
Disabilities in Fantasy
As we know, disabilities come in all kinds. Mental, physical, emotional.
One of the problem with creating/defining a disabled character is deciding how restricted one's character will be. A character who is utterly unable to move will not be available for derring-do unless his mental/dream world is being explored or unless he lives in a world that allows for his mind and heart are able to affect people and situations. This kind of utterly disabled character could be asleep, in a coma, in cryo-sleep or even dead. However, for the most part, a disabled character generally is able to move around.
There are also disabled characters who are not really disabled. This often happens in sci-fi where technology is so advanced that a disability hardly matters anymore. There are also stories where disabilities are considered romantic -- the odd eye-patch, a blind character such as Star Trek's Geordie who seems more hip than challenged (It's the future, after all!) or a character with an attractive limp. Consider the movie, Avatar, where for all intents and purposes, the hero's disability doesn't matter to the extent that it should, and his being helped by a female of a lower/different class feels a bit like Mr Rochester being helped by Jane Eyre. Whatever the effect, the film's creators can preserve their cake and eat it simultaneously. In some fantasies, as in the Drakengard video games, often some exchange is made between the disabled and some other entity which renders the disability useful in some ways. For instance, Caim gives up his voice to bond with his Dragon. It's a loss but it's also a gain.
There is also the situation where a disability is not seen -- by the disabled character, by fellow characters, by the audience, or by the reader as a disability. This can be good, bad, idealized, or romanticized. In the original Star Trek, the Vulcan Spock (and many of the so-called advanced cultures) are idealized because of their inability to feel emotions. There is also a disability which is a kind of living death, a character who has some kind of debilitating ever-worsening illness which makes them continually at war with their bodies, for instance, "The Incredible Shrinking Man."
Whether mentally, intellectually, or physically disabled, a character with a disability is also affected spiritually. They are "marked" in some way that makes them view the world a little differently than others in their world.
Because of my health issues and my son's, I have become very interested in abilities, afflictions, infirmities, and disabilities. I try to see how being disabled can be strengthening to the human soul and how it opens the eyes to situations the able-bodied do not see. I don't think one has had to suffer in order to have one's eyes open to the world but I think it helps. For me, a disabled hero (with a true disability) is an excellent character. I will admit that I often write about disabled characters as a kind of catharsis, or to show the able-bodied how difficult life is for the sickly. But I also write about disabled characters because they populate the world I live in -- especially with the rise of autism in the US population) and they rarely show up as heroes in fantasies. . I feel we ought to show the lives of all kinds of people that disabled people and the "unseen" can see themselves in literature, and that others can see them as well.
In my short story, Lingua Franca, the inhabitants of a far-off planet do not consider themselves disabled. In my novel, Wind Follower, the main character is so ashamed of his disability (epilepsy) that all around him pretend not to see it in order to spare him from shame. There is also an autistic learning disabled character who -- although she is almost an old woman-- is a playmate of the main character. In my novel, Constant Tower, disabled boys born in the Wheel Clan are either killed or made into "living ghosts" called studiers, who are made to feel grateful because they have been spared death. -- Carole McDonnell
Difference and Ability in F&SF
Chris Howard
I spent some time thinking about this month's roundtable topic, disability in fantasy (and SF), building a list of characters I can remember from the literature as well characters in my own books that come to the story with physical or mental differences--differences that force the character down less certain paths or put boundaries on action, sometimes painful boundaries.
I started out with the idea this was going to be difficult, that disabilities in fantasy and science fiction were poorly represented, but hoping that was just my own limited scope of reading, and the lack of differently-abled characters was not pervasive. I think, it turns out, I was partially correct, that there aren’t many examples, but there are significant ones—just from the books I have read. Many more from books I have yet to read.
Lois McMaster Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan, born with significant physical impairments, came immediately to mind. (Bujold has characters with disabilities in several books). Michael Moorcock’s Elric was another, although it’s been decades since I’ve read the stories. William Gibson has several stories containing characters with prostheses, or characters who are wheelchair-bound. There are also a few Tim Powers books, but the one that comes to mind is The Stress of Her Regard, in which the main character, a physician, lives with physical and mental disabilities, as well as other characters with prosthetic eyes and missing limbs. (I did google around after writing this post, and found the "Decloaking Disability Bibliography", a fairly long list of authors with books that attempt "to explore the intersection of disability and technology within texts from the genres of science fiction and the literature of the fantastic." It’s an impressive list, and just shows that I need to find more time to read. Link below).
As my kids have moved through the teenage years I’ve read more and more YA lit, and my impression is there’s some real focus on disabilities there, characters with paralysis, speech limitations, bulimia, dyslexia, Tourette’s syndrome. Most of these aren’t in fantasy or SF books, but in stories that focus on characters struggling to cope with differences in a social context, characters breaking free of walls they have put up themselves, or that society has constructed to hold them back.
This month’s topic also made me look critically at my own work. I do have a few characters with limited or missing senses and limbs (Emandes in Sea Throne, Corina in Seaborn who has lost the complete control of her body), but not that many. I have written several books with main characters who struggle continuously against mental limitations or differences—Kassandra in Saltwater Witch, Thea in Dryad. Internal struggles form the basis for my favorite kinds of characters. This month’s topic put the focus on an important missing element in my reading as well as my writing.
Finally, there’s an interesting recent example—a recent read for me anyway—in Joe Abercrombie’s character Monzcarro “Monza” Murcatto, who begins the first page of Best Served Cold as the ruthlessly competent fighter and captain of Styria’s most feared mercenaries, but by the end of chapter one she’s mercilessly killed and thrown off the battlements into a ravine. Duke Orzo, who commands and orchestrates the whole thing, can wipe his hands and go about his continued political maneuvering with his greatest military threat broken and lying in her own blood below his castle, dead.
Almost.
Monza, it turns out, is only mostly dead. She’s picked up—almost in pieces—by a mysterious stranger and nursed back to a damaged but still breathing version of her old self. As you can guess by the book’s title, she sets out to destroy everyone involved in her “death”. I won’t be giving anything away in saying I think she does okay.
Decloaking Disability Bibliography
http://www.panix.com/~kestrell/Decloa...
Chris Howard is a creative guy with a pen and a paint brush, author of Seaborn (Juno Books), Salvage (Masque/Prime, 2013), and a shelf-full of other books. His short stories have appeared in a bunch of zines, latest is “Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archeology” in Fantasy Magazine. His story “Hammers and Snails” was a Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Fiction Contest winner. He writes and illustrates the comic, Saltwater Witch. His ink work and digital illos have appeared in Shimmer, BuzzyMag, various RPGs, and on the pages and covers of books, blogs, and other interesting places. Last year he painted a 9 x 12 foot Steampunk Map of New York for a cafe in Brooklyn. Find out everything at http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com
The Abilities of Disability – at Least in Fantasy
In real life, disability is exactly what it says. A lack. A limitation. A loss of possibilities open to others, whether to see, to hear, to walk, to run, or just to go a week without the black dog of depression dropping on your back to take the taste out of everything.
Atop the inner physical limitations, come external ones: doors too narrow for a wheelchair, handles too high to reach, prompts or safety signals only visible, or only audible. A flight of “simple” stairs. Even an escalator can be another infuriating check to someone with a “disability.”
Add on the invisible limits: as with race, class, and colour, even heterosexuality, disability can leave a person either Othered or literally invisible. Even when visible, the unlucky Other has to run the gauntlet, if not of naming for the problem – right up or down to names like Hopaling Cassidy – then of the other egregious reactions, from pity to repulsion: less happily than Hopalong, the person vanishes behind the stereotype.
In fantasy, as with race, class and colour etc., things could, even ought to be different. Alas, a quick mental survey of Fantasy I Have Read matches too well with the real-world social map: blind seers or crippled beggars appear quite often among minor or even lesser characters. I can recall only one high-to-mid-level blind character, the bard in Tanya Huff’s Four Quarters series, who is definitely and encouragingly NOT disabled by his blindness and indeed, in the first book, plays a crucial climactic role.
Again, in The Privilege of the Sword, Ellen Kushner offers a powerful cameo of her previous lead character, the great swordsman Richard St. Vier, now suffering from loss of all but peripheral vision, yet devising his own remedies, to remain a swordmaster unparalleled.
Barbara Hambly has two main male characters, wizards whose magic is off-set by poor vision. One is Antryg Windrose, her most notable wizard, and perhaps my favourite among wizards, Gandalf included. Antryg’s myopia is definitely not “disabling” – though his ability to practice martial arts without his glasses does stretch my credibility – it is only one in a bouquet of anti-establishment attributes. Antryg comes from a dirt-poor tundra family, he learnt his arts from the series’ main villain, and he is more gloriously dotty than even T. H. White’s Merlin, even Antryg frequently considering himself to be outright mad.
There is no deaf, blind, and certainly no paraplegic or quadriplegic main character or protagonist in any fantasy I can think of (and don’t mention Bujold’s Miles Vorkosigan, his universe is unequivocally SF.) Does this mean mainstream fantasy is as exclusive of the disabled as of non-WASP, middleclass, heterosexual protagonists?
There is some justification, on narrative grounds. Fantasy is, after all, an adventure genre. Protagonists have to be equally fit for flight or fight, accustomed or at least able to confront dragons and scale castles at a blink. As Hambly’s Californian geek computer programmer ponders at one point in the Windrose series, after three days spent on the run, or the walk, in a pre-Industrial countryside, eating bread and cheese and sleeping in haystacks: “Thank God I don’t have allergies – that’s probably something selected against in the evolution of heroines.” (Silent Tower 179.) And so are blindness, deafness, and of course, any form of wheelchair limitation. Disabilities just make things too difficult for the writer, you see?
But should they? Try telling anyone that Long John Silver’s wooden leg limited Treasure Island in any way, adventures included. Come to that, does lameness limit Hopalong Cassidy? Sure, it would probably bring an appreciable change if Long John had needed to push a wheelchair over Hispaniola, but otherwise?
In fact, for a writer, disability should present not a limit but a valuable asset, especially in building characters. And by this I don’t mean simply turning the “disabled” to an Other of terror and nightmare, as Long John Silver becomes. Without going completely Pollyanna, I consider disability in a main character will give a writer not just means to individualize him/her, but to strengthen that character morally, emotionally, and what matters most to a writer, charismatically.
I can say this from experience: in the third Amberlight book, Source, I invented an imperial heir, known as a crown prince, with a “delicate stomach,” that could be upset without warning or rule by certain foods. (Art again anticipating nature, I later found one of my own friends actually has this problem.) At the time, this was just an individuating quirk in a mid-range character. But Therkon went on to become the male lead in the fourth, (unpublished) book, Dragonfly, and there I was charmed to find his stomach upsets did not merely show Men under Pressure Behaving Well, but could actually function as part of the plot. Not merely to hamper the action at crisis but to advance the emotional plot (love-story, okay?) and, in one case, to help hero and heroine out of a tight corner as well.
Again, though I can’t recall a fantasy hero with a mental disability, (there are a few in SF), I managed to produce one who could suffer from clinical depression. Also unpublished as yet, The Heart of the Fire was meant as my version of the super swordsman: silent, deadly, impregnable to all finer feelings. Unfortunately, by Chapter 2 his workname had become The Killer Caramel, since he had developed an incurable weakness for fostering orphan calves.
Later more lethal character flaws surfaced: at life crises he would drink himself, not into mere alcoholism, but to a hair-trigger readiness to take offense, and his case, kill someone. Or someones. Later, he would sink into life-threatening lethargy. Only after four books and buckets of wonderfully dramatic angst did his life even out to a point where these phases finally faded away.
Such “cures” are less available in reality. But as a writer, I have found disability, at least of a “minor” variety, a powerful and fertile trope. Ironically, at least to a writer, “disability” should be considered less a limitation than a valued basis on which to build a strong, dramatic, even charismatic hero/ine. And what writer would consider one of those a disability?
Sylvia Kelso lives in North Queensland, Australia. She writes fantasy and SF set in analogue or alternate Australian settings. She has published six fantasy novels, two of which were finalists for best fantasy novel of the year in the Australian Aurealis genre fiction awards, and some short stories in Australian and US anthologies.
This was first posted at:
http://carolemcdonnell.blogspot.com/2...
Disabilities and the Fantastic
In Irish mythology, only a king without imperfections could sit on the throne. According to The Encyclopedia of Celtic Mythology and Folklore (Checkmark Books, 2004) “a king could only claim the goddess of the land as his wife—and through her, sovereignty of the country—if he were whole and without blemish. If injured he was forced to abdicate the throne” (49). So it was for Nuada, who lost his hand or arm in battle, and had it replaced with a silver one (thus becoming Nuada of the Silver Hand). This injury meant he had to give up his leadership of the Tuatha Dé Danaan.1 Only when he is given a magical prosthesis is he allowed to return to the throne. His silver hand is not enough; it has to be covered by a special skin to appear normal (362).
Nuada lost his throne, thanks to prejudice against the disabled. That he did is indicative of attitudes which suggest that those who are not “whole” are no longer capable, and that their disability somehow hurts others, in this case, the people he ruled. Nuada was still able to fight with his silver appendage, but that wasn’t good enough. He wasn’t whole; he couldn’t be king.
Tiny Tim, in A Christmas Carol, is another disabled character in fantastic literature. His lonely crutches in the corner, carefully preserved, are a familiar image to many readers. If he is not treated, death is his future—and it is only through the repentance of Scrooge’s evil ways that Tiny Tim can receive the medical care he needs. Unlike Nuada, who experiences prejudice, Tim is accepted and loved by his family. But it could be argued that Dickens is exhibiting prejudice against the disabled, as he isn’t a fully realized character; rather he is a symbol of repentance and redemption, an image of pity, and not a little boy who happens to have a disability.
So, what is going on with the presentations of the disabled, of disabilities in the fantastic? Surely, there are characters who are more than just victims of prejudice and pathetic imagery? My (admittedly unscientific and indeed casual) research for this blog took me to The Passive Voice website (http://www.thepassivevoice.com/09/201...), and “10 Inspirational Disabled Characters from Sci-Fi and Fantasy.” Tyrion Lannister, from Game of Thrones, immediately got my attention. Yes, as Passive Guy says, “The insults thrown at Tyrion Lannister in both the books and the TV show Game Of Thrones are, sadly, a reflection of what many dwarfs in our real world have to go through (although Tyrion, being a contrary sort, takes one of these insults – “Imp” – and makes it his own).” But he is presented as a “fantastic character first, a dwarf second . . .Of course his size is an important part of what makes him Tyrion, but he’s so much more: clever, sardonic, scheming, sexy and vulnerable. Tyrion is not “just” a dwarf: he’s one of the best characters on TV right now.”
Another character I found intriguing was Toothless, from How to Train Your Dragon. He has a damaged tail, which dooms him to being flightless, and thus, probably to death. Young Viking Hiccup, however, makes him a prosthetic tail (perhaps the “first dragon-limb-replacement”) and he takes wing. According to Passive Guy, Toothless is a “great example to set kids who might never have thought about what it means to need a prosthesis.”
All right, so far, so good. Better, yes? Well, not according to one commentator, Steve Godden, who felt the entire list bordered patronizing, and borderline insensitive. Must the disabled be inspirational and good examples? Can’t they just be a dragon who needs a tail, or a prince who happens to be a dwarf? Godden found this list to be “[offputting sic] as characters are being defined by their disabilities, and therefore not as whole people. He notes that the “One of the things the athletes at the para-Olympics requested is that the term ‘inspiring’ should not be used.” As he further notes, “Characters are only ‘inspiring’ if they stoically accept their disability.” However, another commentator, Mira, brings up the question of intent. Why are these characters in the story at all? It is important, she argues, that the disabled be seen, and not hidden away or (often literally) looked over. According to Mira, “. . . sometimes those in a targeted community sometimes get too caught up in political correctness, and forget intent. Sensitivity is important, for sure, but sometimes there are positive things happening even if they are not 100% sensitive.”
True and Godden agrees: “Representation is important, I just wish we had reached a place where there was no need to represent because it was no longer an issue.” But we will always have the disabled, whether due to genetics or an accident or disease. The place we need to reach is one in which there is no longer discrimination against the disabled, and they are considered whole people, and not a disability, or inspiring examples.
In the interest of full disclosure (and shameless self-promotion) two of my main characters in Harvest of Changelings and The Called, Russell and Jeff have learning disabilities, a legacy from their fairy heritage. I remember being quite aware of not making them an image but fully realized people who are, among a long list of adjectives, also learning disabled. I hope I succeeded; that was my intent.
So, there has been progress from Nuada’s disguised hand and Tiny Tim’s presentation as an image and not a boy who is disabled. A bad-ass prince, a dragon, and two boys who help save the world. They are real, visible, and certainly not stoic and they are certainly more than their disability: they are heroes.
Let’s keep on until we reach the place where the disabled are just there, among the rest of us—all part of the human rainbow—including disabled villains.
Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short fiction has appeared in such journals and publications as Icarus, Collective Fallout, North Carolina Literary Review, and The Silver Gryphon. His story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was recently published in Queer Fish 2.
1 The Tuatha Dé Danann ("peoples of the goddess Danu), are a race of people in Irish mythology. In the invasions tradition, they are the fifth group to settle Ireland. The Tuatha Dé Danann are thought to derive from the pre-Christian deities of Ireland. When the surviving stories were written, Ireland had been Christian for centuries, and the Tuatha Dé were represented as mortal kings, queens and heroes of the distant past; however there are many clues to their former divine status. A poem in the Book of Leinster lists many of them, but ends "Although [the author] enumerates them, he does not worship them." Goibniu, Creidhne and Luchta are referred to as Trí Dé Dána ("three gods of craftsmanship"), and the Dagda’s name is interpreted in medieval texts as "the good god." Even after they are displaced as the rulers of Ireland, characters such as Lugh, the Morrígan, Aengus and Manannán mac Lir appear in stories set centuries later, showing all the signs of immortality (Wikipedia contributors. "Tuatha Dé Danann." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, 22 Feb. 2013. Web. 19 Mar. 2013).
Evil and the Fantastic: Great Fantasy Traveling Roundtable Blog, September 2013
This month, my fellow Fantasy Roundtable Bloggers and I discuss what many have argued is inherent and integral to fantasy literature, evil. Is evil necessary in fantasy? Is Good versus Evil an integral and essential conflict? Do heroes need villains? Here are some thoughts on those questions and others on evil and the fantastic.
Warren Rochelle
Evil and the Fantastic
As luck would have it, just last week I asked my English 379 (Fantasy Literature) students to respond to this prompt, while we were reading and discussing The Fellowship of the Ring:
Discuss evil as an element of fantasy, paying attention to how it is presented in The Fellowship of the Ring. Is evil necessary for fantastic literature? Why? Do we have to have evil to understand and appreciate good? What can we learn from evil about human nature?
Their responses were quite interesting. Below is a sample:
According to Wanda*:
“Evil is necessary for all literature, not necessarily in the form of a villain, but in some form that is counter to good. Evil is not black and white because people are not black and white. Each character in a story has flaws, has vices, and has the possibility for evil. The ring in LOTR brings out the corruptibility or weakness in each character that comes into contact with it (besides Tom), even resulting in Boromir’s death.”
Margaret argues that fantasy needs evil—or villains—to be interesting and engaging:
“Is it possible for a fantasy to exist without evil? Or more importantly, without the villain? As much as it would be a perfect utopian setting, it wouldn’t be very interesting. Imagine the Lord of the Rings without Sauron or any of Grimm’s fairytales without the wicked stepmother. The idea just doesn’t fly. But take The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the fifth Narnia book. There are a few scenes in the story where the characters are faced with temptation: a spell to become the most beautiful, a pool that turns all to gold, treasure when hoarded breeds a dragon. However, I don’t necessarily classify these as evil; at least, they don’t fall into the same category as the White Witch or the Calormenes.”
Jed insists that
“The existence of Evil is absolutely paramount in Fantasy. In it the difference between Good and Evil, which is blurred in many genres, is stark and apparent. At [its] very foundation, Fantasy is the valiant struggle of what is pure and good against that which is corrupt and evil.”
Aaron insists we see past the simplistic black and white:
“Ultimately, issues of “good” and “evil” are important elements of any story. Morality, or lack thereof, is a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Good fantasy explores this just as much as any other type of literature. There is no reason why is has to do so in a simplistic way.”
Zeno has this to say
“In the end, conflict is the essence of Fantasy; but the best stories are ones that acknowledge that “evil” is not necessarily a cut and dried force; even books in which there are forces of pure evil and good, there are situations where “good” characters must deal with their own “evil.” Evil, as an idea, is necessary to fantasy, because it provides a stable and easily recognizable theme for the conflict that any book will center around. However, the best books force us to reconsider what is evil, and how best to deal with that evil, and how to respond when, occasionally, good people do bad things, and evil people do good things.”
Arabella doesn’t think evil is essential, arguing that
“I don't think evil is a necessary element of the fantasy genre, however it is an important element of many fantastical books. Just like in any other genre, the story doesn't have to be good vs. evil. The plot doesn't need to center around an evil wizard, ruler, or fantastical creature. What fantasy does is give us the option for those type of plots, making evil an important element, although not a necessary one.
Fantasy opens up new worlds and in those worlds is the opportunity for characters to be truly evil. An opportunity, not a requirement. In the world we live in, I would argue that evil does not truly exist. Our world is categorized in shades of grey and though some may be darker or lighter than others, they are not a pure white or black. The fantasy genre can create worlds in which there is that absolute good and evil we can trust. There is often a distinct line with the good guys on one side and the villains on the other. There can be obvious criteria for those characters who make up good or evil and through these the story can be ruled by the absolutes. Evil is yet another fantastical element that can be a part of fantasy stories. It helps create boundaries and definitions of what is good and through evil the goodness of characters becomes not only more obvious, but also in a way more good. The two opposite ends of the spectrum play against each other to create the good vs. evil fantasy story to which we are accustomed.”
What conclusions, if any, can be drawn from this random sampling of the 43 students enrolled in the 2 sections of Fantasy Lit I am teaching this semester? Many, but not all of them, fall in the category of the “fantasy geek” kids who cut their teeth on Rowling, Tolkien, and a variety of role-playing games, and love, love, love Game of Thrones. They are really into this stuff. A surprising number came to Tolkien first through the movies. A goodly number want to write the great American fantasy novel, and have reams of various drafts already written.
So, is evil is a necessity in fantastic literature? Sort of, yes, no, maybe. Conflict, yes—evil, maybe. Is evil even real? Is it, as another student noted in class discussion, the absence of good? Is their youth that prevents some of them from seeing that evil can be a matter of degree, that a Dark Lord isn’t a necessary presence? That evil can both be banal and ordinary and a Balrog or a Dark Lord? That evil doesn’t always leaves scars and wounds on the body, but as well on the mind and the heart?
Conflict, as in any story, fantasy or not, is an essential plot element. In fantasy, this is often—quite often—expressed as good vs. evil. The hero must have an enemy. It is in this conflict and in this exploration of just what is good and evil that we learn what fantasy has to teach us: what it means to be human and that to be human is to be capable of both good and evil. And here, I would argue, is one of the greatest strengths of fantasy literature.
***
Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010), all published by Golden Gryphon Press. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short fiction has been published in such journals and collections as Icarus, Collective Fallout. The Silver Gryphon, North Carolina Literary Review, Romance and Beyond, and Aboriginal Science Fiction. His short story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published in Queer Fish 2. He is presently working on a novel about a gay werewolf and his godling boyfriend and a collection of gay-themed speculative fiction short stories.
For more information, please see: http://warrenrochelle.com
*All student names have been changed to protect their privacy. Each student gave written or oral permission for their work to appear here.
Deborah Ross
Evil, the Fantastic, and Making Sense Out of Pain
I don’t think it’s possible to discuss evil without talking about the literature of the fantastic. We hear people talk about “evil incarnate,” usually in reference to some person or institution that has committed particularly heinous acts, as if evil were a tangible, measurable thing that exists outside the human imagination. In real life, things are rarely that simplistic.
Certainly, history and even some current religious thought puts forth the notion of those, human or not, who are inherently evil. To this day, some people believe that snakes (or spiders or other animals) are evil (I encountered one such man in a pet store, warning his young son that the garter snake would steal his soul if he weren’t careful). Once the mentally ill (or physically ill, such as those who suffer from epilepsy) were thought to be possessed by demons. Such beliefs persist today on the fringes of mainstream Western society, although they have largely been expunged from medical and psychiatric practice. We believe that such conditions as schizophrenia and sociopathy arise from disorders of neurophysiology, even if we cannot yet pinpoint the precise etiology. Even when we do know exactly what neurotransmitters and part of the brain are involved, it is still a widespread and understandable human tendency to ascribe unexplained phenomena, whether beneficial or destructive, to supernatural agency. Even though intellectually we may understand that a mass murderer is not an incarnation of some demonic spirit, nor is he possessed by one, and even if we cannot explain why such a person is utterly lacking in empathy for other human beings, we still often use words like evil, wicked, damned, devilish, satanic, and demonic.
Humans are capable of cruelty and viciousness so extreme in degree or scope that few of us can comprehend it, let alone the motivation behind it. How can we make sense of atrocities like the Holocaust or its equivalents, historical or modern? Of the massacres in Africa, Central Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, to name but a few?
I think we can’t, not by ordinary thought. The mind numbs with the magnitude of such deliberately inflicted suffering and takes refuge in numbers, pop psychology, and political analysis. It is difficult enough to struggle with the petty unkindnesses of everyday life, the irritations, the mundane acts of thoughtlessness, the emotions like jealousy or vindictiveness. Almost everyone loses their temper with one another at one time or another, or an unhealed resentment prompts them to strike out without thinking. These acts are understandable even when we disapprove of them, because they lie within the scope of our own experience. As we seek forgiveness for ourselves, we find the means to extend it to others. While these moments, and the means of making and accepting amends, smooth our relationships, they don’t make for a very dramatic tale.
Fantastical literature, on the other hand, enlarges the sphere of reality. This could be the introduction of magical elements into the ordinary world (urban fantasy), or parallel worlds (such as Faerie or Narnia) that interact with our own, each with its own set of rules. Or completely independent worlds (Discworld, Middle Earth).
Fantastical literature is also characterized by the use of archetype and metaphor to evoke experiences for which we have no direct vocabulary. We don’t need to have personally surrendered to the Dark Side of the Force in order to understand why the temptation is at once seductive and terrifying. Nor do we need to have witnessed an atomic bomb blast to imagine the devastation of dragonfire or a wrathful volcano god/dess.
In discussing how to portray interesting, multi-dimensional villains, it’s often pointed out that these characters – antagonists to the point of view character – are often heroes in their own eyes. They don’t get up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say, “I’m going to be evil today” or “Evil! Evil! Rah-rah-rah!” The best and most frightening villains have the same capacity for greatness as do heroes, whether it is physical prowess, intellect, a wounded heart, or simple charisma, only it is applied either in the wrong manner or for the wrong ends. If a tragic hero has a fatal flaw but is nonetheless admirable, then a great villain also has his blind spots, to his ultimate ruin.
Evil in fantastical literature ranges from the motivating force in such otherwise sympathetic villains to a “pure” black-and-white quality, one that is so alien to ordinary human sensibilities as to be utterly incomprehensible. We cannot know what it is, but we can know its effects – what it does to individuals, nations, and entire worlds. Black-and-white evil is in most instances a whole lot less interesting than those who come under its influence but still retain some degree of choice. That choice may be a once-and-for-all decision, informed or otherwise, or it can be the continuing possibility of turning away from the inevitable consequences, a possibility that diminishes with each step toward the abyss.
If Evil is monolithic, unmixed with any goodness, and incapable of change, then the resolution of the story conflict is reduced to either/or, yes/no, win/lose. This is not to say that such tales are less adrenaline-fueled than those that are more complex, only that there are fewer possibilities for a denouement: Evil wins and everyone dies/suffers; Good wins and the hero lives happily ever after; Good wins but the hero meets a tragic, sacrificial end. The first two may lead to an exciting climax and catharsis but are unlikely to offer the deeper emotional resonance of the third. If, on the other hand, Evil is one among many conflicting motivations, other resolutions become possible. The evil character discovers the capacity for love and sacrifices himself for a greater cause; the hero and villain form an alliance; either hero or villain crosses the gulf between them and healing ensues; the villain makes a last-ditch effort to salvage some good from the harm he has done; the possibilities become endless. All these rely on the capacity of sentient beings to choose their future actions, even when they had no power over what happened to them in the past and cannot undo what they have done. And in the course of these journeys, we ourselves gain insight into our own unhealed wounds, our festering resentments, our self-condemnation, and ultimately, our hope for redemption.
**
Deborah J. Ross began writing professionally in 1982 as Deborah Wheeler with Jaydium and Northlight and short stories in Asimov's, F & SF, Realms of FantasyY and Star Wars: Tales From Jabba's Palace. Now under her birth name, Ross, she is continuing the" Darkover" series of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as original work, including the fantasy trilogy The Seven-Petaled Shield, forthcoming from DAW. She is a member of Book View Cafe. She's lived in France, worked for a cardiologist, studied Hebrew, yoga and kung fu, plays classical piano, loves horses, and is active in the local Jewish and Quaker communities.
http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/
Carole McDonnell
Personalized Personified Evil
Evil comes in many forms. It can be subtle, like a self-loathing thought. It can be impersonal like a famine, man-made like a war. It can be global, like a swarm of alien invaders, or it can be personal where one finds one's self and only one's self turning into a fly. It can be brushing like poverty ...or falsely joyful soaring like crack cocaine or soma. It can be, invasive and occult like a cancer. It can be deceptive like a double-agent, giving wrong information...like Iago turning all our white to black…or like a demon disguising itself as an angel of light.
I'm a Christian so I guess I'll write about Personalized Personified Evil. There are so many things to hate about evil -- its pettiness, its selfishness, its delusion, its egotism. But what I have always disliked about evil is its relentlessness, its ugly, ugly will. As a Christian, I'll say it even more clearly: I hate Satan --him and his ugly, ugly will.
The relentlessness of evil is not fascinating, certainly not in daily life. Although sometimes the great villains -- as in the scifi film Terminator-- are fascinated because they have the human quality of relentlessness.
Sometimes the "evil" is a system --as in The Hunger Games or Stepford Wives or non-human --as in HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or TRON, or the MATRIX or an oligarchy/cult -- as with the nine-headed-hydra of Greek myth or Metropolis or Rosemary's Baby or even Deliverance or of the kind of kin/households one often finds in horror films –then the evil must be endured, made powerless, or systematically dismantled section by section. That is structural relentlessness.
Very often, however, the pattern of evil is of the pattern shown in the Bible. Evil is contained within one Person. That person has control of many systems, minions of differing hierarchy, has A) superior knowledge, B) a rationalized goal, C) the lack of care for those who must be trampled for the completion of the goal, D) total power or near-total power and E) the utter dislike of personal failure. And finally...relentlessness, which is the mental strength to commit to the goal repeatedly and to reassess and recalibrate until the goal is achieved or the evil Person is destroyed.
Jesus described the Devil as one who comes to kill, to steal, to destroy and the best Biblical representation of evil or Satan is shown in the battle between Moses and Pharaoh. The lines are drawn. A good God and an enslaved people on one side and on the other side a relentless Figure of Power who refuses to let the enslaved people go. It doesn't matter how defeated the Figure of Evil (or his minions) are -- the goal is enslavement of another.
The human characters in fantasy can be considered demonic, even though they don't represent the Devil himself. So while there are many evil characters in fantasy who come to kill, steal, and destroy, the fact is an evil character can elicit pity, identification, and fear. We fear evil in the fantastic because we recognize its immensity. We identify with the evil because we see our own flaws in them. And we pity the evil (sometimes) because we recognize that at one point or another, we were stopped by a greater power or we realized our own powerlessness.
**
Carole McDonnell is the author of the fantasy novels, Wind Follower and The Constant Tower, both published by Wildside Press.
Chris Howard
Fantastically Evil
I started out with the idea of spinning this topic away from the Saurons of the genre—the supremely bad players with vast armies of hideous soldiers and architecturally magnificent but poorly-lit fortresses, players who want to take over extensive amounts of someone else’s territory, an entire world, or some valuable plane of existence. I wanted to spin this topic toward the blended moralities in Glenn Cook, Joe Abercrombie, Brent Weeks, and others, where the main characters are not always good, and some are clearly great fans of seeing others in pain—proudly wearing their “Go Sauron” jackets when off screen.
On the other hand I know the “evil protagonist” thing is all the rage. Every fantasy and SF discussion group on Goodreads and the Amazon forums has a dozen threads on “books where there main character is evil”, or something like that.
What about the good villain—or apparently good villain? I don’t mean where the villain thinks he’s doing the right thing, because that’s pretty much what drives every complexly-written scoundrel. Power-hungry, ladder-climbing, step over the bodies of your superiors to get what you want types of characters are the mainstay. Power, money, control—these are the things that motivate so many baddies, along with a generous portion of justification for whatever they are after.
Another common theme is the bad guy or girl who must do something evil in order to survive —kill, drink blood, go all Mr. Hyde on us, or do bad things as the result of some curse. Come on, doesn’t everyone deserve to survive? Every reader can understand that kind of drive, and in many cases it’s the thoughtful appreciation (and sometimes sympathy) that shapes the reader’s reaction to the villain’s actions, usually based on the physical and emotional price paid by the afflicted character in order to fight or throw off the curse.
Still, that’s still not quite the evil I’m thinking about—or the “good” when I say “good villain.” Like many writers I spend a lot of time thinking about evil—evil people, as well as their actions and motives. First, someone tell the NSA I was just doing research. Second, here’s where I’m going:
What if the character or characters who represent evil in a story want to help develop the world instead of destroy it? What if they benefit as much as the heroes, the shopkeepers, the simple but courageous village gardeners from the worldwide advancement of magic, technology, living conditions, clean water, and green pastures? What if they are as much turned off by a giant volcano spewing reeking sulfurous clouds as any hero? What if they are against war of any kind?
I started down this path in Teller, with the principal evil character making it clear that she wants all of humanity to progress. She’s even willing to help in an underground, organized-movement sort of way—you know, duffle-bags full of cash, “removing obstacles”, and other varieties of influence in the right places. Teller is contemporary fantasy, and so the characters are living in a world with runes, rockets, and Reddit. Think of hundreds of “evil” characters around the world, nominally working together, with the common goal of getting rid of humans. Not by wiping them out—that would be messy, but by making sure that civilization either advances to the point where humans can travel to other planets—getting the majority of them offworld, or to the point where humans develop the technology to “digitize human consciousness” and go virtual—with two paths from there: withdrawal into some localized computational substrate with a small realworld footprint (e.g., “still here, but quiet and out of the way”), or by extending the range of exploration by sending “digitized human freight” to planets lightyears away and decanting the data into physical forms on the other side (e.g., “grass is always greener colonization strategy”). The baddies want our world after all—and although they really don’t get along, there is one clear and shared requirement for the take-over: they want the world in move-in condition.
I continued plotting and writing using this flavor of evil with my latest book, Salvage, where the principal evil character, Damaris, is completely open to discussions with one of the protagonists, and even hints that he’s going to invest in the character’s company Knowledgenix, which develops advanced autonomous robots. Damaris genuinely likes Jon Andreden, and wants to help him succeed.
Evil in the fantasy genre doesn’t have to mean miles of wasteland, ever-present storm clouds, minions with sharp weapons and low morale, or any mode of transportation that involves chiropteran wings—although I am a fan of some of these, especially the wings. To me, a villain who shares values with the protagonist frightens me more than any straightforward grab for money or power. It totally freaks out the heroes, too.
**
Chris Howard is just a creative guy with a pen and a paint brush, author of Seaborn (Juno Books, 2008), Salvage (Masque/Prime Books, 2013), Nanowhere (Lykeion, 2005), and a shelf-full of other books. His short stories have appeared in a bunch of zines, latest is "Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archeology" in Fantasy Magazine. His story "Hammers and Snails" was a Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Fiction Contest winner. He writes and illustrates the comic Saltwater Witch. His art has appeared in Shimmer, BuzzyMag, various RPGs, and on the pages of books, blogs, and other interesting places. Find out everything here: http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com
Valjeanne Jeffers
Wither the Evil and the Fantastical?
I have often contemplated the nature of evil. What is it that drives men and women to commit evil deeds? I have concluded that evil folks are made, not born. And there are many reasons that evil doers continue on their path. The quest for power. Selfishness. An abiding hatred of everyone― including themselves.
Thus, as a writer, I have found that villains with myriad layers are more interesting, realistic and more fun than one dimensional evil doers—the villain tormented by love or guilt over his own deeds. The man or woman obsessed with material gain or power. This is the stuff of which great villains are made; such as the antagonists of my Immortal series, “Tehotep” and “Z100,” the villainess of The Switch II: Clockwork. Art, after all, should imitate life.
Then too, some evil acts may be committed by folks who are not necessarily evil but who have simply made the wrong choices (whatever their motivation). I recently had an inner dialogue about one of my newest characters. I concluded that the character was not evil. But she does make choices that result in mayhem. And who among us has not made bad decisions? And in my Immortal saga and The Switch II: Clockwork (which includes books I and II), I explore these questions through my characters—none of whom are perfect—and plots.
Yet what would a science/fantasy novel be without the fantastical?
Fantastic is described as wondrous and wild; to quote a few definitions. These are perfect metaphors for a SF/fantasy villain: an evil doer with preternatural powers and with dark foreboding or evil intentions. A villain can, and should, wreak havoc with the lives of one’s heroines and heroes.
In my novels my evil doers are imbued with fantastic powers―supernatural or man-made. Of course, I've given fantastical gifts to my heroines and heroes, too. And thank goodness for this! For how could they complete their life-changing quests without them? How could the plot twists and turns take place? How could the glorious battles I envisioned, happen? The fantastic too, is a perfect metaphor for speculative fiction. For as writers we don’t want the ordinary. We don’t want the humdrum.
We want the fantastik. This is stuff of which SF/fantasy worlds are made.
In my newest novels, which I’ll release later this year, Mona Livelong: Paranormal and Colony: Ascension, I've used both the evil and the fantastic to build my worlds. Take a gander below at the excerpt for Mona Livelong: Paranormal Detective.
Sally looked closer, stretching his mouth further open with a gloved hand. She reached inside. “It looks like a key. . .How did I miss this?” Probing with her fingertips, she pulled the metal from where it was sticking just under his tongue. All at once, she jerked spasmodically.
“Sally—Sally!”
“Yes. . . I. . .” The laboratory waved before her eyes. . .
Light from a single, gas streetlamp pooled upon the empty street. Footfalls echoed behind her, unhurried, yet unrelenting in their step.
She whirled around His big, tattooed body blocked the dim light.
He was a swarthy man, with dimpled cheeks and full lips, handsome, except for his glistening gray eyes; and his smile. . . a terrible cold grin, the grimace of a killer: a sadist. . .
I hope I’ve done justice to my characters. I hope my readers will be pleased.
**
Valjeanne is the author of the SF/fantasy novels: Immortal, Immortal II: The Time of Legend, Immortal III: Stealer of Souls, and the steampunk novelsImmortal IV: Collision of Worlds and The Switch II: Clockwork (includes books I and II).
She is a graduate of Spelman College, NCCU and a member of the Carolina African American Writers' Collective. She has been published under both Valjeanne Jeffers and Valjeanne Jeffers-Thompson. Her writing has appeared in: The Obamas: Portrait of America's New First Family, from the Editors of Essence, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, Pembroke Magazine, Revelry, Drumvoices Revue 20th Anniversary, and Liberated Muse: How I Freed My Soul Vol. I. She was also a semi-finalist for the 2007 Rita Dove Poetry Award.
Valjeanne's fiction has appeared in Steamfunk! Genesis: An Anthology of Black Science Fiction, Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology, LuneWing, PurpleMag, Genesis Science Fiction Magazine, Pembroke Magazine, Possibilities, 31 Days of Steamy Mocha, and Griots II: Sisters of the Spear (in press). She works as an editor for Mocha Memoirs Press and is also co-owner of Q& V Affordable editing. Preview or purchase her novels at: http://www.vjeffersandqveal.com
Andrea Hosth
Evil in Fantasy
One of the biggest clichés of fantasy is the Dark Lord. Nameless, faceless and big on Mwahaha, the Dark Lord is Evil because he is Evil. His motivations include "More Evil Now,” "Evil for the Sake of Evil,” "Can I Get Some Evil with That?" and "Just Because.” Or World Domination.
Dark Lords are generally accompanied by Minions. The minions are often nameless, faceless/masked and lack such complexities as a personality. Created to serve – or just brought up bad – they unswervingly follow orders and are rarely human enough to have a crisis of loyalty.
A Dark Lord, an unequivocal Evil with no reasons other than Evil, can still make for a compelling tale. Some of the creepiest stories I've read, the most genuinely frightening, involve a true nameless, faceless evil: implacable, impossible to reason with, and entirely lacking in easily exploitable weaknesses or Evil Overlord logic.
Despite the fact that my first attempt at a book featured a Dark Lord (Sith the Destroyer) and obedient minions (Tar'Sithans) – at least until I edited them into slightly less paper-thin cyphers – I'm not generally inclined to use "Evil because Evil" primary antagonists (though I'm happy to throw thousands of predatory monsters into my characters' paths). Instead I tend to lean toward "greedy people" and "quite reasonable people with conflicting interests". The latter are not so much "Evil" as "on the wrong side".
My greedy people drift quite close to the Faceless Evil archetype, and tend to spend most of the story off the stage. I'm generally not that interested in detailing the slippery selfishness of a person who, when everyone has enough apples to get by, decides to scheme or manipulate or outright take someone else's apples. These people often start out conscienceless, and their development is from greedy to greedier. I think they constitute a kind of Evil, just one which doesn't name itself that way.
People with conflicting interests, on the other hand, fascinate me, although I quite often can't write from their point of view. The person who steals an apple because their family is starving. And then realises that by stealing that apple, they're making someone else's family suffer. Would they still steal the next apple? How do they justify it? What if that apple becomes two, or twenty, or all? And that quick, unnoticed theft becomes a need to protect yourself from retribution, and outright damage, and people dying by deliberate act. At what point do you become Evil? Is it the first apple? Or the first awareness of damage? The irrevocable blow?
Or are people with conflicting needs simply people with conflicting needs, and right to do what to others is wrong?
I try to take care when making the other side in a story "Evil". Because if "they're Evil" is the reason, the excuse, the justification for any and all actions by those the story considers "Good,” at what point will people of that world be able to point to my characters and say: "Evil"?
**
Andrea K Höst was born in Sweden but raised in Australia. She writes fantasy and science fantasy, and enjoys creating stories which give her female characters something more to do than wait for rescue. See: www.andreakhost.com
Warren Rochelle
Evil and the Fantastic
As luck would have it, just last week I asked my English 379 (Fantasy Literature) students to respond to this prompt, while we were reading and discussing The Fellowship of the Ring:
Discuss evil as an element of fantasy, paying attention to how it is presented in The Fellowship of the Ring. Is evil necessary for fantastic literature? Why? Do we have to have evil to understand and appreciate good? What can we learn from evil about human nature?
Their responses were quite interesting. Below is a sample:
According to Wanda*:
“Evil is necessary for all literature, not necessarily in the form of a villain, but in some form that is counter to good. Evil is not black and white because people are not black and white. Each character in a story has flaws, has vices, and has the possibility for evil. The ring in LOTR brings out the corruptibility or weakness in each character that comes into contact with it (besides Tom), even resulting in Boromir’s death.”
Margaret argues that fantasy needs evil—or villains—to be interesting and engaging:
“Is it possible for a fantasy to exist without evil? Or more importantly, without the villain? As much as it would be a perfect utopian setting, it wouldn’t be very interesting. Imagine the Lord of the Rings without Sauron or any of Grimm’s fairytales without the wicked stepmother. The idea just doesn’t fly. But take The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, the fifth Narnia book. There are a few scenes in the story where the characters are faced with temptation: a spell to become the most beautiful, a pool that turns all to gold, treasure when hoarded breeds a dragon. However, I don’t necessarily classify these as evil; at least, they don’t fall into the same category as the White Witch or the Calormenes.”
Jed insists that
“The existence of Evil is absolutely paramount in Fantasy. In it the difference between Good and Evil, which is blurred in many genres, is stark and apparent. At [its] very foundation, Fantasy is the valiant struggle of what is pure and good against that which is corrupt and evil.”
Aaron insists we see past the simplistic black and white:
“Ultimately, issues of “good” and “evil” are important elements of any story. Morality, or lack thereof, is a fundamental aspect of the human condition. Good fantasy explores this just as much as any other type of literature. There is no reason why is has to do so in a simplistic way.”
Zeno has this to say
“In the end, conflict is the essence of Fantasy; but the best stories are ones that acknowledge that “evil” is not necessarily a cut and dried force; even books in which there are forces of pure evil and good, there are situations where “good” characters must deal with their own “evil.” Evil, as an idea, is necessary to fantasy, because it provides a stable and easily recognizable theme for the conflict that any book will center around. However, the best books force us to reconsider what is evil, and how best to deal with that evil, and how to respond when, occasionally, good people do bad things, and evil people do good things.”
Arabella doesn’t think evil is essential, arguing that
“I don't think evil is a necessary element of the fantasy genre, however it is an important element of many fantastical books. Just like in any other genre, the story doesn't have to be good vs. evil. The plot doesn't need to center around an evil wizard, ruler, or fantastical creature. What fantasy does is give us the option for those type of plots, making evil an important element, although not a necessary one.
Fantasy opens up new worlds and in those worlds is the opportunity for characters to be truly evil. An opportunity, not a requirement. In the world we live in, I would argue that evil does not truly exist. Our world is categorized in shades of grey and though some may be darker or lighter than others, they are not a pure white or black. The fantasy genre can create worlds in which there is that absolute good and evil we can trust. There is often a distinct line with the good guys on one side and the villains on the other. There can be obvious criteria for those characters who make up good or evil and through these the story can be ruled by the absolutes. Evil is yet another fantastical element that can be a part of fantasy stories. It helps create boundaries and definitions of what is good and through evil the goodness of characters becomes not only more obvious, but also in a way more good. The two opposite ends of the spectrum play against each other to create the good vs. evil fantasy story to which we are accustomed.”
What conclusions, if any, can be drawn from this random sampling of the 43 students enrolled in the 2 sections of Fantasy Lit I am teaching this semester? Many, but not all of them, fall in the category of the “fantasy geek” kids who cut their teeth on Rowling, Tolkien, and a variety of role-playing games, and love, love, love Game of Thrones. They are really into this stuff. A surprising number came to Tolkien first through the movies. A goodly number want to write the great American fantasy novel, and have reams of various drafts already written.
So, is evil is a necessity in fantastic literature? Sort of, yes, no, maybe. Conflict, yes—evil, maybe. Is evil even real? Is it, as another student noted in class discussion, the absence of good? Is their youth that prevents some of them from seeing that evil can be a matter of degree, that a Dark Lord isn’t a necessary presence? That evil can both be banal and ordinary and a Balrog or a Dark Lord? That evil doesn’t always leaves scars and wounds on the body, but as well on the mind and the heart?
Conflict, as in any story, fantasy or not, is an essential plot element. In fantasy, this is often—quite often—expressed as good vs. evil. The hero must have an enemy. It is in this conflict and in this exploration of just what is good and evil that we learn what fantasy has to teach us: what it means to be human and that to be human is to be capable of both good and evil. And here, I would argue, is one of the greatest strengths of fantasy literature.
***
Warren Rochelle has taught English at the University of Mary Washington since 2000. His short story, "The Golden Boy” (published in The Silver Gryphon) was a Finalist for the 2004 Gaylactic Spectrum Award for Best Short Story and his novels include The Wild Boy (2001), Harvest of Changelings (2007), and The Called (2010), all published by Golden Gryphon Press. He also published a critical work on Le Guin and has academic articles in various journals and essay collections. His short fiction has been published in such journals and collections as Icarus, Collective Fallout. The Silver Gryphon, North Carolina Literary Review, Romance and Beyond, and Aboriginal Science Fiction. His short story, “The Boy on McGee Street,” was just published in Queer Fish 2. He is presently working on a novel about a gay werewolf and his godling boyfriend and a collection of gay-themed speculative fiction short stories.
For more information, please see: http://warrenrochelle.com
*All student names have been changed to protect their privacy. Each student gave written or oral permission for their work to appear here.
Deborah Ross
Evil, the Fantastic, and Making Sense Out of Pain
I don’t think it’s possible to discuss evil without talking about the literature of the fantastic. We hear people talk about “evil incarnate,” usually in reference to some person or institution that has committed particularly heinous acts, as if evil were a tangible, measurable thing that exists outside the human imagination. In real life, things are rarely that simplistic.
Certainly, history and even some current religious thought puts forth the notion of those, human or not, who are inherently evil. To this day, some people believe that snakes (or spiders or other animals) are evil (I encountered one such man in a pet store, warning his young son that the garter snake would steal his soul if he weren’t careful). Once the mentally ill (or physically ill, such as those who suffer from epilepsy) were thought to be possessed by demons. Such beliefs persist today on the fringes of mainstream Western society, although they have largely been expunged from medical and psychiatric practice. We believe that such conditions as schizophrenia and sociopathy arise from disorders of neurophysiology, even if we cannot yet pinpoint the precise etiology. Even when we do know exactly what neurotransmitters and part of the brain are involved, it is still a widespread and understandable human tendency to ascribe unexplained phenomena, whether beneficial or destructive, to supernatural agency. Even though intellectually we may understand that a mass murderer is not an incarnation of some demonic spirit, nor is he possessed by one, and even if we cannot explain why such a person is utterly lacking in empathy for other human beings, we still often use words like evil, wicked, damned, devilish, satanic, and demonic.
Humans are capable of cruelty and viciousness so extreme in degree or scope that few of us can comprehend it, let alone the motivation behind it. How can we make sense of atrocities like the Holocaust or its equivalents, historical or modern? Of the massacres in Africa, Central Europe, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia, to name but a few?
I think we can’t, not by ordinary thought. The mind numbs with the magnitude of such deliberately inflicted suffering and takes refuge in numbers, pop psychology, and political analysis. It is difficult enough to struggle with the petty unkindnesses of everyday life, the irritations, the mundane acts of thoughtlessness, the emotions like jealousy or vindictiveness. Almost everyone loses their temper with one another at one time or another, or an unhealed resentment prompts them to strike out without thinking. These acts are understandable even when we disapprove of them, because they lie within the scope of our own experience. As we seek forgiveness for ourselves, we find the means to extend it to others. While these moments, and the means of making and accepting amends, smooth our relationships, they don’t make for a very dramatic tale.
Fantastical literature, on the other hand, enlarges the sphere of reality. This could be the introduction of magical elements into the ordinary world (urban fantasy), or parallel worlds (such as Faerie or Narnia) that interact with our own, each with its own set of rules. Or completely independent worlds (Discworld, Middle Earth).
Fantastical literature is also characterized by the use of archetype and metaphor to evoke experiences for which we have no direct vocabulary. We don’t need to have personally surrendered to the Dark Side of the Force in order to understand why the temptation is at once seductive and terrifying. Nor do we need to have witnessed an atomic bomb blast to imagine the devastation of dragonfire or a wrathful volcano god/dess.
In discussing how to portray interesting, multi-dimensional villains, it’s often pointed out that these characters – antagonists to the point of view character – are often heroes in their own eyes. They don’t get up in the morning, look in the mirror, and say, “I’m going to be evil today” or “Evil! Evil! Rah-rah-rah!” The best and most frightening villains have the same capacity for greatness as do heroes, whether it is physical prowess, intellect, a wounded heart, or simple charisma, only it is applied either in the wrong manner or for the wrong ends. If a tragic hero has a fatal flaw but is nonetheless admirable, then a great villain also has his blind spots, to his ultimate ruin.
Evil in fantastical literature ranges from the motivating force in such otherwise sympathetic villains to a “pure” black-and-white quality, one that is so alien to ordinary human sensibilities as to be utterly incomprehensible. We cannot know what it is, but we can know its effects – what it does to individuals, nations, and entire worlds. Black-and-white evil is in most instances a whole lot less interesting than those who come under its influence but still retain some degree of choice. That choice may be a once-and-for-all decision, informed or otherwise, or it can be the continuing possibility of turning away from the inevitable consequences, a possibility that diminishes with each step toward the abyss.
If Evil is monolithic, unmixed with any goodness, and incapable of change, then the resolution of the story conflict is reduced to either/or, yes/no, win/lose. This is not to say that such tales are less adrenaline-fueled than those that are more complex, only that there are fewer possibilities for a denouement: Evil wins and everyone dies/suffers; Good wins and the hero lives happily ever after; Good wins but the hero meets a tragic, sacrificial end. The first two may lead to an exciting climax and catharsis but are unlikely to offer the deeper emotional resonance of the third. If, on the other hand, Evil is one among many conflicting motivations, other resolutions become possible. The evil character discovers the capacity for love and sacrifices himself for a greater cause; the hero and villain form an alliance; either hero or villain crosses the gulf between them and healing ensues; the villain makes a last-ditch effort to salvage some good from the harm he has done; the possibilities become endless. All these rely on the capacity of sentient beings to choose their future actions, even when they had no power over what happened to them in the past and cannot undo what they have done. And in the course of these journeys, we ourselves gain insight into our own unhealed wounds, our festering resentments, our self-condemnation, and ultimately, our hope for redemption.
**
Deborah J. Ross began writing professionally in 1982 as Deborah Wheeler with Jaydium and Northlight and short stories in Asimov's, F & SF, Realms of FantasyY and Star Wars: Tales From Jabba's Palace. Now under her birth name, Ross, she is continuing the" Darkover" series of the late Marion Zimmer Bradley, as well as original work, including the fantasy trilogy The Seven-Petaled Shield, forthcoming from DAW. She is a member of Book View Cafe. She's lived in France, worked for a cardiologist, studied Hebrew, yoga and kung fu, plays classical piano, loves horses, and is active in the local Jewish and Quaker communities.
http://deborahjross.blogspot.com/
Carole McDonnell
Personalized Personified Evil
Evil comes in many forms. It can be subtle, like a self-loathing thought. It can be impersonal like a famine, man-made like a war. It can be global, like a swarm of alien invaders, or it can be personal where one finds one's self and only one's self turning into a fly. It can be brushing like poverty ...or falsely joyful soaring like crack cocaine or soma. It can be, invasive and occult like a cancer. It can be deceptive like a double-agent, giving wrong information...like Iago turning all our white to black…or like a demon disguising itself as an angel of light.
I'm a Christian so I guess I'll write about Personalized Personified Evil. There are so many things to hate about evil -- its pettiness, its selfishness, its delusion, its egotism. But what I have always disliked about evil is its relentlessness, its ugly, ugly will. As a Christian, I'll say it even more clearly: I hate Satan --him and his ugly, ugly will.
The relentlessness of evil is not fascinating, certainly not in daily life. Although sometimes the great villains -- as in the scifi film Terminator-- are fascinated because they have the human quality of relentlessness.
Sometimes the "evil" is a system --as in The Hunger Games or Stepford Wives or non-human --as in HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or TRON, or the MATRIX or an oligarchy/cult -- as with the nine-headed-hydra of Greek myth or Metropolis or Rosemary's Baby or even Deliverance or of the kind of kin/households one often finds in horror films –then the evil must be endured, made powerless, or systematically dismantled section by section. That is structural relentlessness.
Very often, however, the pattern of evil is of the pattern shown in the Bible. Evil is contained within one Person. That person has control of many systems, minions of differing hierarchy, has A) superior knowledge, B) a rationalized goal, C) the lack of care for those who must be trampled for the completion of the goal, D) total power or near-total power and E) the utter dislike of personal failure. And finally...relentlessness, which is the mental strength to commit to the goal repeatedly and to reassess and recalibrate until the goal is achieved or the evil Person is destroyed.
Jesus described the Devil as one who comes to kill, to steal, to destroy and the best Biblical representation of evil or Satan is shown in the battle between Moses and Pharaoh. The lines are drawn. A good God and an enslaved people on one side and on the other side a relentless Figure of Power who refuses to let the enslaved people go. It doesn't matter how defeated the Figure of Evil (or his minions) are -- the goal is enslavement of another.
The human characters in fantasy can be considered demonic, even though they don't represent the Devil himself. So while there are many evil characters in fantasy who come to kill, steal, and destroy, the fact is an evil character can elicit pity, identification, and fear. We fear evil in the fantastic because we recognize its immensity. We identify with the evil because we see our own flaws in them. And we pity the evil (sometimes) because we recognize that at one point or another, we were stopped by a greater power or we realized our own powerlessness.
**
Carole McDonnell is the author of the fantasy novels, Wind Follower and The Constant Tower, both published by Wildside Press.
Chris Howard
Fantastically Evil
I started out with the idea of spinning this topic away from the Saurons of the genre—the supremely bad players with vast armies of hideous soldiers and architecturally magnificent but poorly-lit fortresses, players who want to take over extensive amounts of someone else’s territory, an entire world, or some valuable plane of existence. I wanted to spin this topic toward the blended moralities in Glenn Cook, Joe Abercrombie, Brent Weeks, and others, where the main characters are not always good, and some are clearly great fans of seeing others in pain—proudly wearing their “Go Sauron” jackets when off screen.
On the other hand I know the “evil protagonist” thing is all the rage. Every fantasy and SF discussion group on Goodreads and the Amazon forums has a dozen threads on “books where there main character is evil”, or something like that.
What about the good villain—or apparently good villain? I don’t mean where the villain thinks he’s doing the right thing, because that’s pretty much what drives every complexly-written scoundrel. Power-hungry, ladder-climbing, step over the bodies of your superiors to get what you want types of characters are the mainstay. Power, money, control—these are the things that motivate so many baddies, along with a generous portion of justification for whatever they are after.
Another common theme is the bad guy or girl who must do something evil in order to survive —kill, drink blood, go all Mr. Hyde on us, or do bad things as the result of some curse. Come on, doesn’t everyone deserve to survive? Every reader can understand that kind of drive, and in many cases it’s the thoughtful appreciation (and sometimes sympathy) that shapes the reader’s reaction to the villain’s actions, usually based on the physical and emotional price paid by the afflicted character in order to fight or throw off the curse.
Still, that’s still not quite the evil I’m thinking about—or the “good” when I say “good villain.” Like many writers I spend a lot of time thinking about evil—evil people, as well as their actions and motives. First, someone tell the NSA I was just doing research. Second, here’s where I’m going:
What if the character or characters who represent evil in a story want to help develop the world instead of destroy it? What if they benefit as much as the heroes, the shopkeepers, the simple but courageous village gardeners from the worldwide advancement of magic, technology, living conditions, clean water, and green pastures? What if they are as much turned off by a giant volcano spewing reeking sulfurous clouds as any hero? What if they are against war of any kind?
I started down this path in Teller, with the principal evil character making it clear that she wants all of humanity to progress. She’s even willing to help in an underground, organized-movement sort of way—you know, duffle-bags full of cash, “removing obstacles”, and other varieties of influence in the right places. Teller is contemporary fantasy, and so the characters are living in a world with runes, rockets, and Reddit. Think of hundreds of “evil” characters around the world, nominally working together, with the common goal of getting rid of humans. Not by wiping them out—that would be messy, but by making sure that civilization either advances to the point where humans can travel to other planets—getting the majority of them offworld, or to the point where humans develop the technology to “digitize human consciousness” and go virtual—with two paths from there: withdrawal into some localized computational substrate with a small realworld footprint (e.g., “still here, but quiet and out of the way”), or by extending the range of exploration by sending “digitized human freight” to planets lightyears away and decanting the data into physical forms on the other side (e.g., “grass is always greener colonization strategy”). The baddies want our world after all—and although they really don’t get along, there is one clear and shared requirement for the take-over: they want the world in move-in condition.
I continued plotting and writing using this flavor of evil with my latest book, Salvage, where the principal evil character, Damaris, is completely open to discussions with one of the protagonists, and even hints that he’s going to invest in the character’s company Knowledgenix, which develops advanced autonomous robots. Damaris genuinely likes Jon Andreden, and wants to help him succeed.
Evil in the fantasy genre doesn’t have to mean miles of wasteland, ever-present storm clouds, minions with sharp weapons and low morale, or any mode of transportation that involves chiropteran wings—although I am a fan of some of these, especially the wings. To me, a villain who shares values with the protagonist frightens me more than any straightforward grab for money or power. It totally freaks out the heroes, too.
**
Chris Howard is just a creative guy with a pen and a paint brush, author of Seaborn (Juno Books, 2008), Salvage (Masque/Prime Books, 2013), Nanowhere (Lykeion, 2005), and a shelf-full of other books. His short stories have appeared in a bunch of zines, latest is "Lost Dogs and Fireplace Archeology" in Fantasy Magazine. His story "Hammers and Snails" was a Robert A. Heinlein Centennial Short Fiction Contest winner. He writes and illustrates the comic Saltwater Witch. His art has appeared in Shimmer, BuzzyMag, various RPGs, and on the pages of books, blogs, and other interesting places. Find out everything here: http://www.SaltwaterWitch.com
Valjeanne Jeffers
Wither the Evil and the Fantastical?
I have often contemplated the nature of evil. What is it that drives men and women to commit evil deeds? I have concluded that evil folks are made, not born. And there are many reasons that evil doers continue on their path. The quest for power. Selfishness. An abiding hatred of everyone― including themselves.
Thus, as a writer, I have found that villains with myriad layers are more interesting, realistic and more fun than one dimensional evil doers—the villain tormented by love or guilt over his own deeds. The man or woman obsessed with material gain or power. This is the stuff of which great villains are made; such as the antagonists of my Immortal series, “Tehotep” and “Z100,” the villainess of The Switch II: Clockwork. Art, after all, should imitate life.
Then too, some evil acts may be committed by folks who are not necessarily evil but who have simply made the wrong choices (whatever their motivation). I recently had an inner dialogue about one of my newest characters. I concluded that the character was not evil. But she does make choices that result in mayhem. And who among us has not made bad decisions? And in my Immortal saga and The Switch II: Clockwork (which includes books I and II), I explore these questions through my characters—none of whom are perfect—and plots.
Yet what would a science/fantasy novel be without the fantastical?
Fantastic is described as wondrous and wild; to quote a few definitions. These are perfect metaphors for a SF/fantasy villain: an evil doer with preternatural powers and with dark foreboding or evil intentions. A villain can, and should, wreak havoc with the lives of one’s heroines and heroes.
In my novels my evil doers are imbued with fantastic powers―supernatural or man-made. Of course, I've given fantastical gifts to my heroines and heroes, too. And thank goodness for this! For how could they complete their life-changing quests without them? How could the plot twists and turns take place? How could the glorious battles I envisioned, happen? The fantastic too, is a perfect metaphor for speculative fiction. For as writers we don’t want the ordinary. We don’t want the humdrum.
We want the fantastik. This is stuff of which SF/fantasy worlds are made.
In my newest novels, which I’ll release later this year, Mona Livelong: Paranormal and Colony: Ascension, I've used both the evil and the fantastic to build my worlds. Take a gander below at the excerpt for Mona Livelong: Paranormal Detective.
Sally looked closer, stretching his mouth further open with a gloved hand. She reached inside. “It looks like a key. . .How did I miss this?” Probing with her fingertips, she pulled the metal from where it was sticking just under his tongue. All at once, she jerked spasmodically.
“Sally—Sally!”
“Yes. . . I. . .” The laboratory waved before her eyes. . .
Light from a single, gas streetlamp pooled upon the empty street. Footfalls echoed behind her, unhurried, yet unrelenting in their step.
She whirled around His big, tattooed body blocked the dim light.
He was a swarthy man, with dimpled cheeks and full lips, handsome, except for his glistening gray eyes; and his smile. . . a terrible cold grin, the grimace of a killer: a sadist. . .
I hope I’ve done justice to my characters. I hope my readers will be pleased.
**
Valjeanne is the author of the SF/fantasy novels: Immortal, Immortal II: The Time of Legend, Immortal III: Stealer of Souls, and the steampunk novelsImmortal IV: Collision of Worlds and The Switch II: Clockwork (includes books I and II).
She is a graduate of Spelman College, NCCU and a member of the Carolina African American Writers' Collective. She has been published under both Valjeanne Jeffers and Valjeanne Jeffers-Thompson. Her writing has appeared in: The Obamas: Portrait of America's New First Family, from the Editors of Essence, The Ringing Ear: Black Poets Lean South, Pembroke Magazine, Revelry, Drumvoices Revue 20th Anniversary, and Liberated Muse: How I Freed My Soul Vol. I. She was also a semi-finalist for the 2007 Rita Dove Poetry Award.
Valjeanne's fiction has appeared in Steamfunk! Genesis: An Anthology of Black Science Fiction, Griots: A Sword and Soul Anthology, LuneWing, PurpleMag, Genesis Science Fiction Magazine, Pembroke Magazine, Possibilities, 31 Days of Steamy Mocha, and Griots II: Sisters of the Spear (in press). She works as an editor for Mocha Memoirs Press and is also co-owner of Q& V Affordable editing. Preview or purchase her novels at: http://www.vjeffersandqveal.com
Andrea Hosth
Evil in Fantasy
One of the biggest clichés of fantasy is the Dark Lord. Nameless, faceless and big on Mwahaha, the Dark Lord is Evil because he is Evil. His motivations include "More Evil Now,” "Evil for the Sake of Evil,” "Can I Get Some Evil with That?" and "Just Because.” Or World Domination.
Dark Lords are generally accompanied by Minions. The minions are often nameless, faceless/masked and lack such complexities as a personality. Created to serve – or just brought up bad – they unswervingly follow orders and are rarely human enough to have a crisis of loyalty.
A Dark Lord, an unequivocal Evil with no reasons other than Evil, can still make for a compelling tale. Some of the creepiest stories I've read, the most genuinely frightening, involve a true nameless, faceless evil: implacable, impossible to reason with, and entirely lacking in easily exploitable weaknesses or Evil Overlord logic.
Despite the fact that my first attempt at a book featured a Dark Lord (Sith the Destroyer) and obedient minions (Tar'Sithans) – at least until I edited them into slightly less paper-thin cyphers – I'm not generally inclined to use "Evil because Evil" primary antagonists (though I'm happy to throw thousands of predatory monsters into my characters' paths). Instead I tend to lean toward "greedy people" and "quite reasonable people with conflicting interests". The latter are not so much "Evil" as "on the wrong side".
My greedy people drift quite close to the Faceless Evil archetype, and tend to spend most of the story off the stage. I'm generally not that interested in detailing the slippery selfishness of a person who, when everyone has enough apples to get by, decides to scheme or manipulate or outright take someone else's apples. These people often start out conscienceless, and their development is from greedy to greedier. I think they constitute a kind of Evil, just one which doesn't name itself that way.
People with conflicting interests, on the other hand, fascinate me, although I quite often can't write from their point of view. The person who steals an apple because their family is starving. And then realises that by stealing that apple, they're making someone else's family suffer. Would they still steal the next apple? How do they justify it? What if that apple becomes two, or twenty, or all? And that quick, unnoticed theft becomes a need to protect yourself from retribution, and outright damage, and people dying by deliberate act. At what point do you become Evil? Is it the first apple? Or the first awareness of damage? The irrevocable blow?
Or are people with conflicting needs simply people with conflicting needs, and right to do what to others is wrong?
I try to take care when making the other side in a story "Evil". Because if "they're Evil" is the reason, the excuse, the justification for any and all actions by those the story considers "Good,” at what point will people of that world be able to point to my characters and say: "Evil"?
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Andrea K Höst was born in Sweden but raised in Australia. She writes fantasy and science fantasy, and enjoys creating stories which give her female characters something more to do than wait for rescue. See: www.andreakhost.com
