Myths for hire.

This morning Milady and I broke our fasts together, and Genghis Khan came up in conversation (as he does from time to time).  Of course, this conversation ended with a new novel idea burning in my brain, or at least a long short story.

This, of course, makes for one novel on my desk, a massive revision on deck, a major short story revision on top of that, etc. etc. etc., and then this new Khan novel.  For those of you in the know, this one will be more alternate history than  historical thriller or straight-up fantasy, but it will be a lot of fun.  Now if I can only write fast enough to get to it before something *else* distracts me!  Fortunately my cell phone has a voice memo function.

On the plus side, I’m almost done with Part I (first third, roughly) of the new book.

By the way: Watch David Tennant and Patrick Stewart in Hamlet, streaming now at http://www.pbs.org/wnet/gperf/episodes/hamlet/watch-the-film/980/ .  More on this Monday, when my unmentionable bits are not so pressed against the wall.

You’re too tired to make your own coffee

You realize you’ve rewritten the same paragraph about four times

Your total sleep for the past three days is insufficient to support a person for two days

You have difficulty caring about this because if you take a few more nights at half-sleep you might actually be able to tighten this scene until it stops making you wince…

Hello, internet!  The last few days at work and at home have been wildly busy – wedding and work life coming to a head at once – so it’s come down to either my fiction, or you, and I’ve made the choice you always expected.

A few bullets before I leave you for the rest of the day:

• Shakespeare is a pleasure; Shakespeare directed well by a close friend is a true joy.
• What if ideas could think?  Moffatt brings meme sentience to the Doctor Who with the Weeping Angels!  I’m very excited for the next episode.
• When in doubt, add conflict.

Blue skies, clouds, April breeze – out of the office, walking fast as I can to make the carpool to Middletown, to cheer on a friend’s production of Midsummer on Shakespeare’s birthday. Seems like a pretty good life to me.

The last few weeks I’ve been dutifully reading Roberto Bolano’s The Savage Detectives.  This is the first translated novel I’ve read since Sister Pelagia and the Black Monk, which is unusual for me actually.  I used to read a ton of translated fiction, but last year I decided I would make more of an effort to read Americans writing English.  This has paid huge style dividends in my own writing – there’s no better place to learn a language than at the feet of the masters, and the language spoken, and prose written, in America is different than that spoken and written in England and throughout the international world.

Swimming in Faulkner, Hemmingway, Steinbeck (oh, Steinbeck!) has been a joy, and excellent for my writing, but it’s fascinating to return to worlds where the main characters do not speak English at home, and where a different set of giants tower over the literary landscape.  This is especially the case in The Savage Detectives, where Bolano has created an entire literary world populated with authors renowned and forgotten, real and imaginary.  The novel’s pace is slow, stentorian at times, but I get the sense all these threads will weave a tapestry by the end.  Then again, maybe not.

One should judge no man lucky before he is dead, and no book as good until it’s over.  In one respect, though, I’m grateful to Savage Detectives: it’s been a huge help in building the setting for my new novel.  Bolano’s Mexico City has crept into my fantasy Los Angeles (the massive, scabrous metropolis of Dresediel Lex), as has a bit of his vision of life on the edge of reason.  I’m excited to see what will come of this cross-pollination.  Maybe nothing, but it’s hard to say.

This last week’s episode of Doctor Who left me surprisingly cold.

This is partly due to my having just watched John Woo’s Red Cliff, the best war epic I’ve ever seen: casting, pacing, scheming, cinematography, dialogue (it helps that I understand Chinese, naturally), acting (oh the ACTING – Takeshi Kaneshiro and Tony Leung were born to cast knowing looks at one another while having stoic, brilliantly understated conversations), martial arts and rank-and-file action…  No other movie by no other director could mesh superheroic martial arts feats with a hellish, pitched battle without passing into the realm of farce.  As movies go, there are few better ways to spend four and a half hours, and I would watch thirty-six hours more if John Woo were to adapt, with these actors, the rest of the 100 chapter novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms upon 10 chapters of which the film is based.

Juxtaposition of some sort is at fault for my poor reception of this week’s Doctor Who episode, anyway – if not its juxtaposition with Red Cliff, then its juxtaposition with the previous two episodes of the new season, The 11th Hour and The Beast Below, both by Stephen Moffat.  This is the first episode of the new season penned by a writer other than Moffat, and it feels like a flashback to the RTD era.  This is not really the fault of Mark Gatiss, the scribe in question, though he would have done better by writing a location other than a featureless bunker, involving Churchill as an active character rather than a passive bystander, or, I dunno, not allowing the main characters to defuse the bomb with the power of love.  Mostly, the flashback feeling is the fault of the Daleks.

This hurts me to say, but the Daleks deserve to rest.  They appeared so frequently in the RTD era that they became the show’s flagship antagonist, and this weakened them.  The first Dalek (introduced in the episode Dalek!, sensibly enough) shown in the new series could have easily wiped out all of Earth.  Subsequent Daleks never recaptured this initial menace, though they occasionally approached it, in the last two episodes of the first season, or in the hilarious confrontation between the Cybermen and the Cult of Skaro.  By the time the immense Dalek fleet appeared at the end of Season 4, the audience was chilled, but not terrified – an equally-sized band of Sontarans would have been as much of a threat.

Compare this with the Borg , the fiercest enemies bar none in Star Trek: The Next Generation and Star Trek: Deep Space 9.  The Borg hand the crew their greatest military defeats, they break Picard – think about that for a second – and though they are always thwarted in the end, they remain so terrifying throughout the show that when the Enterprise crew finds a single, abandoned Borg on a distant planet, the immediate reaction is “kill it now, before it does… something!”  The threat does not need to be concrete to terrify our heroes; that it is Borg is sufficient.

Star Trek’s writers built this menace by omission.  The Borg had to be defeated at the end of every episode or two-parter in which they appeared – like the Daleks – and .  TNG’s writers realized this quite early on, and avoided using the Borg as much as possible, to maximize their impact.  The Borg appear in, 7 episodes of TNG, and zero episodes of DS9 – 7 hours total out of a two-series run of about 300 hours – and their shadows are more long and terrifying for all this.

(I’m intentionally ignoring Voyager here.)

Meanwhile, the Daleks, like movie elves, are over-exposed.  Each season of the BBC Wales Doctor Who has featured at least two Dalek episodes, one of which is always a two-parter: fully a quarter of Doctor Who screen time since the reboot six years ago has been Dalek-focused, not counting the 2009 specials.  12 of 48 episodes have been Doctor vs. Daleks, and the Daleks have lost every time.  It’s hard to believe in their threat any more.  They need to rest and recharge.  Hopefully the rest of this season will provide them with much-needed R&R, so they can return to exterminating in the fullness of time.

Well, maybe not “all,” but certainly the last chapter.

I spent much of this weekend working on a bridge chapter for the new novel, which I’ve tentatively titled Seven Ravens Rise even though that has nothing to do with the actual content of the story – everything needs to be called something, I suppose, at least until it earns its own name.  (By “bridge chapter”, I mean a chapter designed to bridge two key events in the story, the space between big bullets on my (admittedly loose) outline – a chapter between a climax and the next great challenge, in which recent events have impact and consequence.)

Anyway, after foraging through 3000 words or so of chapter (things go more slowly these days than they did before I was employed full time), various plot threads crystallized in my head and I realized that, while the chapter I had written was fine, what this section of the book really needed was for me to roll back the 3000 words – my entire progress for the weekend – and start again, taking the bridge in a wildly different, much more efficient, direction.  Moments like this are, in some respects, awesome: the story grabs you by the scruff of the neck and shakes you, saying, “It must be like this!”  These days, though, with wedding and work clamoring for my time, it’s easy to get discouraged when I learn that two days of effort have been wasted.

But they haven’t been wasted, of course.  You can only find the right path after taking many wrong ones.  Even Sargent, as my painter friend reminds me, had to scrape off a head every now and again.

Of course, he also used to attack his canvases when the inspiration took him, shouting “demons! demons!”   Maybe I should roll that into my writing process somehow.

After my review of Creatures of Light and Darkness last week I scuttled out to buy a copy, and re-reading it I came upon the following scene: Wakim, assassin servant of death-god Anubis, is attempting to kill two immortals (Vramin and Madrak) and destroy the world of Blis, so as to begin his hunt for the mysterious Prince Who Was A Thousand.  As Wakim is about to strike, he hears a sonic boom and looks up to see a silver comet descending towards him.

Zelazny:

Upward stares Wakim, seeing the Steel General.

“Faintly do I feel that I should have knowledge of him,” says Wakim.

“Come now!” says Vramin, his eyes and cane flashing fire green.  “All know of  the general, who ranges alone.  Out of the pages of history come the thundering hoofbeats of his war horse Bronze.  He flew with the Lafayette Escadrille.  He fought in the delaying action at Jarama Valley.  He helped to hold Stalingrad in the dead of winter.  With a handful of friends, he tried to invade Cuba.  On every battleground, he has left a portion of himself.  He camped out in Washington when times were bad, until a greater General asked him to go away.  He was beaten in Little Rock, had acid thrown in his face in Berkeley.  He was put on the Attorney General’s list, because he had once been a member of the IWW.  All the causes for which he has fought are now dead, but a part of him died also as each was born and carried to its fruition.  He survived, somehow, his century, with artificial limbs and artificial heart and veins, with false teeth and a glass eye, with a plate in his skull and bones out of plastic, with pieces of wire and porcelain inside him – until finally science came to make these things better than those with which man is normally endowed.  He was again re-placed, piece by piece, until, in the following century, he was far superior to any man of flesh and blood.  And so again he fought the rebel battle, being smashed over and over again in the wars the colonies fought against the mother planet, and in the wars the individual worlds fought against the Federation.  He is always on some Attorney General’s list, and he plays his banjo and he does not care, because he has placed himself above the law by always obeying its spirit rather than its letter.  he has had his metal replaced with flesh on many occasions and been a full man once more – but always he hearkens to some distant bugle and plays his banjo and follows – and then he loses his humanity again.  He shot craps with Leon Trotsky, who taught him that writers are underpaid; he shared a boxcar with Woody Guthrie, who taught him that singers are underpaid; he supported Fidel Castro for a time, and learned that lawyers are underpaid.  He is almost invariably beaten and used and taken advantage of, and he does not care, for his ideals mean more to him than his flesh.  Now, of course, the Prince Who Was A Thousand is an unpopular cause.  I take it, from what you say, that those who would oppose the House of Life and the House of the Dead will be deemed supporters of the Prince, who has solicited no support – not that that matters.  And I daresay you oppose the Prince, Wakim.  I should also venture a guess that the General will support him, inasmuch as the Prince is a minority group all by himself.  The General may be beaten, but he can never be destroyed, Wakim.  he is here now.  Ask him yourself, if you’d like.”

The Steel General, who has dismounted, stands now before Wakim and Vramin like an iron statue at ten o’clock on a summer evening with no moon.

Wedding planning is a joyous, often stressful process – but it’s also a fascinating opportunity to engage in social archaeology.  Planning a more-or-less traditional wedding, with all the bows and ribbons and little moving pieces, is the closest most modern folks will get to experiencing what it was like to be a member of the 19th century upper (or upwardly mobile) class.

All those things people do and wear for weddings that seem idiosyncratic at best and arcane at worst were standard elements of party planning a hundred and thirty years ago: printed or calligraphed invitations with expensive tissue inside, tuxedos, live bands and dancing, table assignments and cocktails and all the rest used to be de rigueur for parties no matter the occasion – think of the soiree at the beginning of War and Peace, one of many occurring on a random night for the nobles and well-bred of Moscow.  Invitations, balls, a presentation, a band, seats assigned to promote interesting conversation, and through it all the hostess whirling with an oil can to grease the wheels of conversation.

Tides of time wash over us and bear us away, but little piles of sand endure, even though they are eroded slowly down the centuries (a Mandarin collar instead of a standard lapel, blue ink in legible font rather than black in archaic script).  I at least, having spent perhaps too much of my life in books, am fascinated to enter that world if only to visit.  If nothing else, I hope to take from the experience a breath of the majesty that would have attended a well-run Victorian party – and maybe a greater appreciation for the immense amount of work required below-stairs to make those “effortless parties” happen.

Speculative fiction is a harsh mistress.  Her greatest scribes are forgotten, or read by a vanishing fraction even of those who profess themselves fans of the genre.  When the geniuses of the field are remembered at all, they’re often remembered for their lesser work, and it’s rare to see justice done.

For now, though, I get to rejoice: Roger Zelazny’s Creatures of Light and Darkness is back in print.

People remember Zelazny primarily for his Amber Chronicles, which are great fun and should be read by anyone who thinks themselves a fan of sword and sorcery or film noir, but there is another Zelazny, a poet of divine and mythic scope, of subtle humor and epic confrontation.  This is the Zelazny who wrote Lord of Light, one of my top three favorite books for about 15 years now.  Lord of Light has long been recognized as a classic for its mixture of humor, action, and philosophy, and its willingness to abandon the European context traditional to science fiction; in recognition of this, it won the Hugo and was reprinted years ago in a handsome Eon books edition.

Meanwhile, Creatures of Light and Darkenss, Zelazny’s other triumph of  mythopeic style, languished in ever-shrinking numbers on used bookstore shelves.  I was lucky enough to find a copy at Book Man in Nashville about eight years ago, and I’ve never seen another in the wild, infuriating because this is one of those books you read and want immediately to recommend to everyone you know who shows the slightest interest in speculative fiction.

The setup: It’s the far future.  Man has colonized a swath of settled space, within which the vagaries of fate and chaos are controlled by a number of border stations, each ruled by a godlike “Angel” – posthuman or deity?  The book is ambiguous on this point – most of whom are also characters recognizable from Egyptian mythology: Anubis, Osiris, Set, Thoth.  Yet there has been war between the gods, and only Anubis remains in the House of Death, and Osiris in the House of Life, from which they coarsely manipulate the world with horrendous plagues and blooms of fertility.  Anubis has one desire: he must kill the mysterious Prince Who Was A Thousand.  Osiris has the same need, and each has dispatched assassins into human space to accomplish this task before the other.

In the middle of all this we have a wandering, militantly agnostic priest, a raving immortal poet who sends his poems through space as waves of green fire, a cybernetic warrior who plays the banjo and has been the leader of every doomed rebellion in history, blind Norn engineers, a rabid fanatical cult in the center of the galaxy that worships the Holy Shoes, posthuman deities so vicious they weave the nervous systems of their enemies into rugs while leaving them alive in excruciating pain, and, most importantly: temporal kung fu.

“The Art of Temporal Fugue,” it’s called in the book.  If you liked the idea when Terry Pratchett used it thirty years later, you owe it to yourself ninety times over to read this book, because you’ve never seen anything like this.  Zelazny takes it upon himself to choreograph a martial arts battle between two people who can travel in time just by thinking hard.  The result is, literally, planet-shattering.

And that scraping of the plot’s surface above doesn’t even begin to describe the book’s structural complexity.  Zelazny wrote Creatures to test his own proficiency with tense and perspective and voice; he didn’t intend to publish it until Samuel Delaney made him.  The structure here is amazing: apparently disparate, haiku-length lines weave together into shocking relevance; some chapters are written as stage plays, others as stream-of-consciousness, others in potent, zen-like minimalism. 

It’s amazing how much of modern science fiction and fantasy spring from Zelazny’s ground.  The recent obsession with the line between gods and men in fantasy (The God Engines by Scalzi, 100 Thousand Kingdoms by NK Jemesin, Warbreaker by Brian Sanderson) and in science fiction, where it masquerades as discussion of post-humanity (Hyperion by Dan Simmons, Dust by Elizabeth Bear, lots of Charles Stross’ work) has deep roots in speculative fiction’s history, but there has never been an SF author more interested in the line between the mortal and the divine as Zelazny, nor has there been one who had as much fun playing hopscotch over it, and encouraging his readers to do the same.