Brown Study

There's something melancholy about sitting by an open window late at night, writing, listening to a train whistle on the edge of town. I often hear them in the hours after midnight. When I see them during the day they're always full of gravel. (A rusty truss bridge is a fine thing.) There are big strip mines in the desert west of the city, beyond the river, which is perennially dry. Lately a forest of wind generators has cropped up on the desolate hills where once a mad Frenchman lorded it over the native tribes, back when this was part of Spain. It's strange, how the same people who decry strip mining seemingly don't mind filling the earth with these symbols of progress which, once the subsidies stop coming in, will surely be allowed to fall to pieces. As long as it isn't within sight of Aspen or Park City, I suppose.

Ah, I'm being cynical. And rambling about with adjectives. I was writing about the sad sound of the train, which I can still hear humming up at the north end of town. I have the window open, and the lace curtains keep blowing against me. It rained earlier and the air is cool now.

There's a scene at the end of David Lean's Doctor Zhivago that often comes to my mind. It's the one where Yuri is staying with Lara and her daughter at Varykino, which has stood long empty, sealed off by the government, surrounded by vast empty fields of snow, encased in ice. At one point Lara wakes up, hears the wolves howling. "This is an awful time to be alive," she says. "No," Yuri replies, with warmth and certainty. And it's there that he writes his greatest poetry.

I've never read the book. But for me the meaning of the film is that life must go on—will go on—no matter what happens in the world. Poets will keep straining for beauty. If the world hinders them, well, they'll do it in spite of the world. The more harried and oppressed they are, the more pure and refined will be the fruits of their hearts and minds.

I hear another train whistle.

On Angels

For my birthday I received a complete set of the Britannica Great Books collection. Neoluddite that I am, I can now rest assured that I, for one, will survive the coming collapse of civilization. I'll be a cultural ark, if you will, floating on the waters of oblivion; all you other people relying on your e-readers (i.e., rented electronic secret decoder rings) are screwed. The firemen of the future will have to come personally to my house to spew kerosene all over my secret collection. Your collection they'll just delete from the main office; or maybe they'll simply change the password. Actually, since we all know that a sprawling bureaucracy will cripple the future state, they'll probably never get around to coming for me at all.

Be that as it may, I've been perusing the collection. One thing that made its publication a truly great undertaking is its preface, the fat, two-volume Syntopticon, which lays the Great Ideas out under one hundred headings, cross-referenced with the other volumes in the set. The first entry is "Angels," and it is that of which I wish to speak. You must forgive me if the discussion sounds rather professorial; I am, after all, a professor. Though a mathematician, I think about angels a lot, as my idea of them plays a significant role in my writing.

Angels are one of the great myths of our culture. They're part of a continuous tradition stretching back into the mists of prehistory, from the astral religion of Babylon to the Hebrew scriptures, the New Testament, and the Koran; from the speculations of the pagan neo-Platonists to the great philosophers of the Middle Ages, Jewish and Muslim and Christian. And I'd wager that most Americans believe in them today.

So, what is an angel? A guy with wings and blue jeans? A vision of fire and light? The fullest, most detailed account of their nature is to be found in the writings of Thomas Aquinas, the "Angelic Doctor." This Scholastic vision is woven from several historical strands, the first of which is, of course, Scripture, together with Patristic exposition.

Now, the few angels we encounter in Scripture are either mysterious and aloof, like Abraham's guests at Mamre and the angel who wrestled with Jacob, or frightening, inhuman beings, a far cry from Clarence, Michael Landon, and their descendants.

And this was their appearance: they had the form of men, but each had four faces, and each of them had four wings. Their legs were straight, and the soles of their feet were like the sole of a calf's foot; and they sparkled like burnished bronze. Under their wings on their four sides they had human hands… And the living creatures darted to and fro, like a flash of lightning. Now as I looked at the living creatures, I saw a wheel upon the earth beside the living creatures, one for each of the four of them. As for the appearance of the wheels and their construction: their appearance was like the gleaming of a chrysolite; and the four had the same likeness, their construction being as it were a wheel within a wheel… The four wheels had rims and they had spokes; and their rims were full of eyes round about… Wherever the spirit would go, they went, and the wheels rose along with them; for the spirit of the living creatures was in the wheels.

It's a commonplace that these conceptions borrow from the astral worship of ancient Mesopotamia.

"Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone, when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God shouted for joy?"

The connection between stars and angels is clear even in something as late as the Book of Revelation.

And another portent appeared in heaven; behold, a great red dragon, with seven heads and ten horns, and seven diadems upon his heads. His tail swept down a third of the stars of heaven, and cast them to the earth.

This borrowing or cross-fertilization wasn't a secret waiting to be uncovered by modern professors of comparative religion. It's no accident that Magi from the east were led to Bethlehem by a star.

The most prolonged angelic appearance occurs in the deuterocanonical Book of Tobit. (Centuries before modern searchers into ancient secrets were discovering obscure gnostic gospels hidden on the racks of Barnes and Noble, Catholics had their very own secret suppressed texts about prophets and angels.) Tobit describes the adventures of a young man named Tobias who journeys to the east on his father's business. With the help of the angel Raphael he weds the girl Sarah and vanquishes the demon Asmodeus, who had destroyed seven of her suitors. The angel reveals himself at the end:

"I am Raphael, one of the seven holy angels who present the prayers of the saints and enter into the presence of the glory of the Holy One." They were both alarmed; and they fell upon their faces, for they were afraid. But he said to them, "Do not be afraid; you will be safe… All these days I merely appeared to you and did not eat or drink, but you were seeing a vision."

Scriptural and Patristic ideas about angels found an echo in the speculations of the neo-Platonists, who, led by a philosophical instinct, wanted to see a continuous gradation of spiritual beings from the gods down to men. The word "demon," which appears so often in the New Testament, is a Greek word, and carries connotations from the Greek conception of the world of spirits. Modern philosopher-types seem inclined to pass over theories of angels as partaking more of mythology than metaphysics, but they shouldn't be. These theories reflect various solutions to the problem of how the human mind relates to the body. The vein passes through the schools of Plato and Aristotle, the neo-Platonists, Dionysus the Areopagite, the Arabian philosophers, Moses Maimonides, Albertus Magnus, and Thomas Aquinas.

Reading Aquinas himself, you might get the feeling that you're in the realm more of science fiction than fantasy. C. S. Lewis has one of his characters in That Hideous Strength refer euphemistically to angels and demons as macrobes; the word seems particularly apt. Aquinas asserts, first of all, that, not only are angels incorporeal, they are immaterial as well. The words have different meanings. The word matter in his usage has a broader import than in modern scientific jargon; it refers to that which distinguishes one member of a species from another. Since angels are immaterial, then, each angel must be its own species.

Some people, whose minds have been formed by modern physics, imagine that angels must be beings of pure energy like something out of Arthur C. Clarke. Passing over the ignorance of special relativity implied by this, we just have to say that angels aren't that kind of thing at all. They aren't physical. They can't be studied by physical methods.

On the other hand, as regards the plain physicality of many angelic apparitions in Scripture, Aquinas holds that angels are able to compact air particles so as to appear in human form and interact with human beings. But the bodies they assume have only the semblance of life, as Raphael explains to Tobias. Also, an angel can't be said to be in a place in the same sense that a man is in a place. An angel is like a living stream of thought; it becomes "present" at a location through a focusing of its power, but "whereness" as we generally conceive of it is limited to material beings. An angel's mode of apprehension is simple and direct: it doesn't abstract from singulars perceived through the senses or reason from premises to conclusion. On the other hand, no angel can read the secrets of a man's heart. They do have access to occult information, however, and may be able to discern the import of physical or psychological processes in the human brain.

Aquinas, following the Areopagite, separates the angels into three main classes, each of which is further divided into three ranks. The classes reflect the relative exaltedness of the angels' perception of truth. The highest perceive things as they emanate directly from God; these include seraphim, cherubim, and thrones. The middle class—dominions, virtues, and powers—perceive the reasons of things in the plurality of universals. And the lowest class perceive intelligibles in the multitude of particulars. These include principalities (who oversee nations and peoples), archangels (like Gabriel), and angels properly so-called (e.g., guardian angels).

Recently I told my four-year-old son about the idea that every human is guided by his own guardian angel; surprised, he thought about this for a moment, then asked (somewhat skeptically): "Are there seven billion angels?" To which Aquinas would reply: There are many, many more than seven billion. In the Middle Ages it was commonly held that angels oversaw the motion of the heavenly bodies, and it's a myth that the medievals thought we inhabit a flat earth in a small universe. A casual perusal of the books they studied and wrote suffices to explode the idea. Well, Aquinas opined that the number of angels is finite but vast, with far more angels than there are material objects, so that there's a fairly smooth gradation from the most exalted down to man. This desire to "fill in the gaps" strikes a common chord with the pagan philosophers as well as the great fantasists of modern times.

The Harrowing of Gotham

I've been meaning to write a bit about The Dark Knight Rises. I've mentioned that I seldom go to the movies. This is mostly because the theater sends me into sensory overload, but also because I live in a small town in the middle of nowhere. We do have a movie theater, but it's a little scary, and seldom shows the kinds of movies I like to see. For Batman I braved it, though. I was quite overwhelmed by the film; I even drove all the way to the city to rewatch it at a Nice Theater.

The critical response to it at the time was positive but a little on the tepid side. Certainly the film has its faults. The plot is ungainly. There are noticeable holes and contrivances. More annoyingly, it tries too hard to conceal the true identity of the Miranda Tate character, almost to the point of dishonesty. If you want to spring a surprise on the viewer, you have to do it honestly. We all know that actors can act like anything they want, but real people in real situations can't, and there are some psychological obfuscations here that amount to miracles. Not fair. You have to lay everything out on the table. If the viewer guesses it, fine. It won't matter if the story is good enough. A story that depends on withholding information is a weak story. A great director, like Hitchcock, will actually underscore whatever it is the protagonist doesn't see, use it to ratchet up the tension, and then still somehow shock the viewer.

So the film has its faults. But it also has great beauty—a rich and gloomy majesty—and I don't think it got enough credit for that at the time. For one thing, Christopher Nolan clearly has great integrity as a director. He refused to bow to the scourge of our times, the 3D format. He also (I've read) refused to film digitally as a point of craftsmanship. CGI effects were used sparingly, preserving a sense of exhilaration wholly lacking from various eye-popping extravaganzas. (Peter Jackson, I'm talking to you.) Nolan actually used miniatures, life-size models, and sets. What a concept!

The Batman movies are generous movies. They give us more than they have to. They are far more beautiful than we have any right to expect of a superhero movie. Every shot in The Dark Knight Rises is artfully arranged; it uses stark chiaroscuro and an almost monochromatic palette to powerful effect.

Part of the problem with the reception of The Dark Knight Rises is that the film really sits better as a myth or a fantasy than an action adventure. Symbolism abounds. As fire was a motif in The Dark Knight, so is ice a motif in this film. It begins with the image of the bat encased in cracking ice and ends with the city surrounded by a river of ice like Dante's Cocytus. The climax takes place on a snowy morning in the dead of winter, when Batman returns from the dead—the underworld—and sets the city free. The typology of the film places it squarely in Northrop Frye's "mythos of summer": romance.

The complete form of the romance is clearly the successful quest, and such a completed form has three main stages: the stage of the perilous journey and the preliminary minor adventures; the crucial struggle, usually some kind of battle in which either the hero or his foe, or both, must die; and the exaltation of the hero. We may call these three stages respectively, using Greek terms, the agon or conflict, the pathos or death-struggle, and the anagnorisis or discovery, the recognition of the hero, who has clearly proved himself to be a hero even if he does not survive the conflict. A three-fold structure is repeated in many features of romance—in the frequency, for instance, with which the successful hero is a third son, or the third to undertake the quest, or successful on his third attempt. It is shown more directly in the three-day rhythm of death, disappearance and revival which is found in the myth of Attis and other dying gods, and has been incorporated in our Easter. (The Anatomy of Criticism)

In The Dark Knight Rises we see this threefold structure in multiple ways, from Bruce's three attempts to escape from the pit to his defeat by Bane, disappearance from Gotham in its hour of need, and return at the last minute. Bruce/Batman even has a kind of sacrificial role, like Attis: he was the scapegoat driven out of the city at the end of The Dark Knight, while at the end of this film he immolates himself as a nuclear holocaust, delivering Gotham from its long darkness and winter.

The central form of romance is dialectical: everything is focused on a conflict between the hero and his enemy, and all the reader's values are bound up with the hero. Hence the hero of romance is analogous to the mythical Messiah or deliverer who comes from an upper world, and his enemy is analogous to the demonic powers of a lower world. The conflict however takes place in, or at any rate primarily concerns, our world, which is in the middle, and which is characterized by the cyclical movement of nature. Hence the opposite poles of the cycles of nature are assimilated to the opposition of the hero and his enemy. The enemy is associated with winter, darkness, confusion, sterility, moribund life and old age, and the hero with spring, dawn, order, fertility, vigor, and youth. (ibid.)

Ultimately, the foe is the dragon—leviathan—identified with the sterility of the land and the impotence of its king. There's an almost mystical feeling in The Dark Knight Rises that, though things may seem all right on the surface, the city is sick. What is it sick from? An ingested lie. Bruce Wayne is sick too, and from the same malady. The decay of the city and Bruce's senility are one. The unsettling peace won at the end of The Dark Knight wasn't a real peace. The lies have to be exposed and bear their fruit before true healing can come. Bane himself shows that he understands his role when he calls himself "necessary evil."

I do like Bane considerably. He's an urban Lord Humungus, brutal yet articulate, a composite of countless revolutionaries leading men into deeper darkness, the warlord of a city cut off from the outside world by forces of the state like the Duke in Escape from New York. But he isn't an antagonist you can really feel much enmity toward. As he himself noted, he isn't the real foe. The real foe is the knot into which Bruce's life and the life of Gotham have gotten tied, the labyrinth in which they've gotten lost.

In the folk tale versions of dragon-killing stories we notice how frequently the previous victims of the dragon come out of him alive after he is killed… Hence the symbolism of the Harrowing of Hell… Secular versions of journeys inside monsters occur from Lucian to our day, and perhaps even the Trojan horse had originally some links with the same theme. The image of the dark winding labyrinth for the monster's belly is a natural one, and one that frequently appears in heroic quests, notably that of Theseus… In many solar myths, too, the hero travels perilously through a dark labyrinthine underworld full of monsters between sunset and sunrise. (ibid.)

This last may serve as a template for the narrative arc of the trilogy. Bruce journeys through the underworld from the day he falls down the well and is attacked by bats. The bottleneck prison of The Dark Knight Rises is a kind of huge, nightmare version of his well, and the crazy Escheresque labyrinth of the pit is an image of the maze in which he's been lost since he was a boy. His escape is a harrowing—he drops the rope behind him as he leaves—and so is his liberation of the police imprisoned beneath the city.

Then, as day dawns, the dark knight fights alongside the police at last. The city is set free—aptly described through a famous passage from A Tale of Two Cities quoted at length in the movie—and Bruce, dead now to Gotham, is liberated to live a life of obscurity in the sun.

It is a beautiful movie, a dark masterpiece.

Dark City

I recently saw Dark City for the first time. Apparently it came out fifteen years ago, but it just now got to the $5.00 section at the town Wal-Mart, which is how I decide which "new" movies to watch.

It was, to begin with, a visually mesmerizing film. I'm a fan of Fritz Lang, from his early German expressionist work (Die Nibelungen, Metropolis, M) to his American film noir period (Scarlet Street, The Big Heat), and his influence on Dark City is marked. Many of its images come directly from his films, e.g., the man crucified on a clock (Metropolis) and the panel of alien "judges" (M); its closed-world, claustrophobic urban sets remind me of Scarlet Street. Other images owe to 2001: A Space Odyssey, e.g., the opening shot of the hotel window, which resembles HAL's watchful-yet-uncomprehending eye. And its combination of science fiction with film noir motifs is reminiscent of Blade Runner, another favorite of mine.

The plot outline of Dark City could have come right from any number of Philip K. Dick novels. The story begins as the protagonist wakes up in a bathtub at the scene of a brutal murder. His memory has been erased. He finds himself pursued by the police as well as a cabal of mysterious, cadaver-like figures. Eventually he discovers that the city is a kind of laboratory operated by aliens known as the Strangers, beings of pure energy who clothe themselves in dead human bodies. The human subjects all go to sleep at "midnight" (there is no day) and have their memories retooled. Their names, positions in life, etc., are adjusted and traded from day to day. The purpose of the experiment is to find out what remains constant under these changes. What makes a man more than the sum of his memories and motivations? What makes him this individual as opposed to that? In short, the Strangers, who represent a kind of mind-body duality, want to isolate the human soul.

Dark City is often compared to The Matrix. They both came out at about the same time (Dark City was a little earlier) and handle similar themes. In my opinion, Dark City is much the better of the two, and should be more famous than it is.

Now, I'm already biased against The Matrix because I don't like virtual reality tales. Virtual reality or cyberspace or whatever you want to call it is basically just a big video game. Some people think games are becoming more and more realistic, and will one day be able rival real life. People who think that have a perception of reality that is grossly impaired, probably from being glued to the screen and not walking in the park enough. I don't care how fast the microprocessors get. A person raised in a virtual reality environment would be in a state next to which the position of a person raised by termites would be enviable.

At any rate, the moral of The Matrix is basically gnostic. Secret knowledge saves. Perceived reality is only a curtain hiding the truly real. The Matrix stands in the line of Plato's myth of the cave, although in it the idea is only a means to an end, the end being stylized, CGI-enhanced martial arts action.

I think Dark City represents something quite different. Its philosophical thrust is made explicit toward the end, when the protagonist encounters the last surviving Stranger. He says, in effect: You could never understand the human soul because (tapping his forehead) it isn't something in here at all. Memory is not identity, contra A. E. van Vogt and countless others. There is something about the human person that is not physical or neurological; and this thing is the very principle that in-forms us, that makes us persons in the first place.

In Dark City there is no salvation through special knowledge. Even after the protagonist learns what the Strangers have been doing to everyone, the universe is no less inexplicable. He's escaped from the "cave" only to find the silence of the void. He's still in a city flying through dark, empty space with no knowledge of where it all came from. (Is our condition much different?) On the other hand, though he uses a sledgehammer to break through a brick wall to a field of stars, we never have the sense that life is a delusion or a game. Memory may mislead, but the present is real. Love is real.

To sum up, Dark City is a film that I very much enjoyed as someone who likes classic cinema, science fiction, and philosophy. I'm the kind of movie-watcher who rarely goes to the theater but likes to find a few good films he can watch over and over and over. I suspect I've added one to my cycle.

On Naming

My stories take place in a secondary world inhabited by paleozoic plants and animals, humans and abhumans, and a hierarchy of spiritual agencies. I've struggled with the naming of things. My organisms are based on actual genera from the Devonian, Carboniferous, and Permian Periods, fancifully conceived. My abhumans and spirits are inspired by ancient Semitic and Greek folklore and various other things. So, should I adopt names as given by science and folklore, or make up new ones?

I've gone back and forth on this. I've been reading Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun and am much taken with the vocabulary he employs. I like the way he uses modifications of extant words, however obscure, to describe his far-future earth. Baluchither comes to mind—the term he uses for his giant mammalian beasts of burden. Whether these animals are related to the prehistoric baluchitherium is of no importance. The connotation is clear, at least in my mind, and the single word does more work than a page of description. It's alien, yet familiar, ancient, yet futuristic; it strikes the right balance between obscurity and specificity. He also borrows units of measurement, names for vocations and social classes, and so forth. It's all cobbled together from different languages—baluchitherium is itself a mix of Asian and Greek—but then, so is English, and it seems to work.

Then there's Edgar Rice Burroughs, the real pioneer in this line. He takes the opposite approach. He coins new words for most of his Martian species, ranks, etc., e.g., thoat, padwar, jeddak. At the same time, some species, like the great white ape, aren't given special names, while others, such as the calot and the banth, are given characteristics of terrestrial species, in this case, the dog and the lion.

Other approaches abound. Frank Herbert uses the conceit of an invented language to name things in parallel with their English descriptions; which is fitting, since his model for Dune is clearly the story of T. E. Lawrence and the British colonial Middle East. Tolkien uses English terms for most of his sentient races, but again we have the conceit of invented languages, where the common tongue is represented by English, and words like goblin and troll are to be regarded as translations from the Westron. Most of his races have names in other, more "ancient" languages; some races or agencies have names in only those languages.

Well, so, there are various solutions to the problem. I've tried Gene Wolfe's approach, but words like lepidodendron and dimetrodon and dunkleosteus seem to strike a jarring note in my tales, and the genera aren't well enough known to make make the connotations helpful. To my ear, pernath and deinoth and urianth—my made-up words for these things—are much more pleasing, poetically descriptive, and germane to the world they inhabit. Once a creature's been described, its name evokes a vivid mental image, which, I hope, prevents its being confused with another.

On the other hand, while I've tried inventing names for my spiritual agencies, I've never been pleased with the results. If something is supposed to be a seraph, I'd much rather call it a seraph than a word I've made up. Here I really do want the connotations, because they say so much more than I could ever put into words. It's a mistake, too, I think, to make spiritual things too familiar. The less said, the more potent they'll be in the story. Relying on the connotations of the right choice of words helps preserve a sense of mystery.

And then there are the ranks and positions of human affairs. Here, again, I've tried coining words, but the results strike me as a bit silly and hard to follow. Burroughs was an inventor, but his ranks were a simple top-down affair. My world is governed by a complex headless bureaucracy in a steam-age metropolis with various bronze-age tribes on the periphery. Making up titles would involve too much abstract explanation. Borrowing approximations from Greek or Byzantine affairs seems more natural, even if the they're a bit obscure at first. Words like archon and phylarch and exarch and logothete and thaumaturge are real and have the right ring, but their historical usage is elastic enough to allow me to do what I want with them. At the same time, they're just alien enough to avoid the stock mental images summoned by more conventional words like king or chief or viceroy or agent or wizard.

So, what I've settled down to is something of a compromise. I borrow words like seraph and nephel for spiritual agencies. Generally speaking, all species—angelic, abhuman, animal, vegetable—are named using a pseudo-Hebraic style, with the suffix –im for plurals. So we have seraphim, helborim, deinothim, pernathim. This is perhaps in bad taste, as some are made up and some are not. The crossover is behemoth, a kind of giant pareiasaur answering to Job's numinous description of the hippopotamus; I use the roots –oth or –eth for all reptiles and amphibians. Likewise, I use –ath for trees (hemlathim are cordaites and ynathim are sigillaria) and –anth for fishes (e.g., urianth). This latter is based on the word coelacanth, which is in even worse taste. Abhuman species have both poetic names and common English names; helborim are also called goblins, and weluhim, cyclopes. I'm also not above using scientific words if they're sufficiently common and, well, ancient- or biblical-sounding, e.g., trilobite, ammonite. On the other hand, all class- and rank-names are borrowed (or coined) from ancient Greek or Byzantine words, e.g., helot, phylite, logothete. Units of measurement come from Greek as well, e.g., the stade and the mile.

The real goal of all this naming is to create an antediluvian feel and permit a moderately poetic diction without calling attention to itself or making the reader stumble over barbarous jargon. I'm not sure that Tolkien would approve, but the mix I keep going back to seems the least artificial and the most germane to my own mind, which is perhaps the best test of secondary-world coherence.

A. E. van Vogt

The Golden-Age science fiction author A. E. van Vogt (1912 – 2000) was famously called "a pygmy with a giant typewriter" by Damon Knight. Well, I must be a pygmy of a reader, because I prefer van Vogt to every other science fiction writer of his period.

Part of the attraction for me, and part of the disappointment for other readers, perhaps, is that the innovations he explores are not primarily technological. He invents all sorts of futuristic gadgetry, but it's there just to make the plot possible and keep it going. What he's really interested in is putting human beings in new kinds of situations, conforming human society to new patterns, and seeing what happens. Ideas are more important to him than technologies.

There is, for instance, the running theme of The Voyage of the Space Beagle. Voyage is a fix-up novel about an intergalactic scientific expedition, knit together from four stories about encounters with alien life-forms. The stories are interesting in their own right—they must surely have provided inspiration for a number of Star Trek episodes—but what's more interesting to me is their contrast of scientific specialism with holistic understanding. Time and again the specialists come up short in crises through not being able to communicate with one another (or, worse, through academic gamesmanship), while the one "Nexialist" on board is able to integrate the results of their findings to arrive at a simple solution. The space voyage merely serves to isolate aspects of the interplay between the sciences, pragmatic militarism, and the crises that face civilization from time to time, and to point out the weaknesses in the modern framework. It's a disappointment that hypnotism and brainwashing—ideas van Vogt was much addicted to—take the place of rational persuasion at critical points.

The best of van Vogt's novels is surely The World of Null-A. In it, the world is divided into two classes: primitives who live as dictated by chemistry and emotion and think according to Aristotelian logic, classifying everything as black or white; and enlightened elites who recognize that there are…gray areas. Null-A is paralleled with null-E (non-Euclidean geometries) and null-N (non-Newtonian physics). Apparently, being null-A gives you powers to do pretty much whatever you want, including defeating an interstellar space fleet with sticks and stones. And the null-A protagonist, who's supposed to be a new breed of genius (he has two brains) seems bent on racing to his death for no apparent reason. (He actually dies at one point, but no matter: his memories are transported to a cloned body on Venus.) So, the null-A aspect of the novel is rather silly. But it's filled with so much beauty and so many interesting ideas that I can forgive its silliness.

The basic premise is this. Earth is ruled by those closest to grasping the null-A philosophy. Those who actually do grasp it are allowed to emigrate to Venus, a law-free utopia ruled by null-A principles. Examination for null-A proficiency takes place during periodic thirty-day games, reminiscent of the "testing hell" of imperial China. The games machine is a vast rational computer housed in a shining tower at the center of the futuristic capital city of Earth. Venus, on the other hand, is a sylvan paradise where the happy null-A live an idyllic pastoral existence. Much of the planet is forested with trees bigger than skyscrapers. The action moves from Earth to Venus and back to Earth again, as the protagonist, Gilbert Gosseyn, dies and lives again…through a cloned body with implanted memories.

(As an aside, it's interesting to note that van Vogt's identification of memory with identity goes hand in hand with his use of brainwashing techniques to influence recalcitrant antagonists. Brainwashing isn't unethical, because it isn't being done to anybody. There's no underlying person to whom this thing is being done. By changing feelings or memories, you're changing the person into another person, as a sculptor pushes his clay from one shape into another. He's doing something to clay, but it's an abuse of terms to say that he's doing something to a sculpture. There's no constant subject undergoing the operation.)

My wife and I like to read things aloud, and I once tried to read The World of Null-A to her. We didn't get very far. "What is going on?" she kept saying. It just seemed like a bizarre dream to her. And the book is weirdly and wildly incoherent. The characters apparently regard themselves as behaving quite sensibly, and they convince the reader of it from page to page, but if you put it all together it's pure irrationality. I suppose that's part of the draw for me. Life is a little like that, sometimes.

Van Vogt's protagonists tend to be smug adolescents (in maturity if not in age) who do bafflingly foolish or unethical things. In this connection, perhaps it's not out of place to observe that there's an understated, immature kinkiness in most of his characters' sexual situations: Slan ends with the adolescent protagonist's prospect of marrying and mating with two older women, one of whom is quite a bit older; The Weapon Makers is about an immortal man who maintains an imperial bloodline by occasionally wedding his own great-granddaughters; the two goddess-wives in The Book of Ptath can possess other female bodies to make love to their god-husband; Gilbert Gosseyn in The Players of Null-A has his mind projected into the body of a timorous weakling married to a gorgeous princess.

 

Beyond that, as regards the unrealistic action driving van Vogt's plots, Knight referred to him as being like a kid in a sandbox, and one can certainly see grounds for the charge. In a weird way, though, that's part of the draw for me, too. A more positive way of putting it would be to say that van Vogt's stories are naïve. Like an Henri Rousseau painting, they can seem rather silly and childish on the surface, but possess patterns of strange beauty for all that.

His work, sadly, is very uneven. He was a leader in the Dianetics movement that subsequently evolved into Scientology. His later novels, driven to a great extent by fad theories and pieced together from ill-assorted short stories, are his weakest. His best novels are his earliest, written during the forties. My personal favorites are Slan, The Voyage of the Space Beagle, The World of Null-A, The Players of Null-A, The Book of Ptath, The Weapon Shops of Isher, and The Weapon Makers.

Go to your local used bookstore or secondhand store, buy a few van Vogt titles in Ace paperback editions, and read them, savoring the garish covers, the yellow pages, the clumsy dialogue, the brilliant half-expressed ideas.

Publication and Style

My first pro publishing credit, "Misbegotten," seems to have been well received; it even earned Lois Tilton's RECOMMENDED ranking.

Elerit gives the initial impression of a hapless character, but he proves to have deep resources and strong attachment. Another well-imagined setting increases reader enjoyment.

The story is available in both print and podcast form in Beneath Ceaseless Skies. As a magazine that publishes high-quality "literary adventure fantasy," BCS has been in my sights for some time, and I'm very pleased and honored to have my story on their website.

In other news, I've finished a new novel and am now seeking a home for it. Its tentative title is Bronze Sword, Green with Eld. Broadly speaking, it might be described as a philosophical pulp-action epic fantasy. It's set in the same steam-age metropolis and paleozoic counter-earth as my short fiction.

I've been focusing on style over the past year. As regular readers of this blog know, I'm an afficionado of the old Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Unfortunately, though, the style of these works is often either atrocious (Hodgson) or too mannered for a mainstream audience (Dunsany, Eddison). They'll always be favorites of a select few who can look beyond (or learn to savor) their eccentricities, but, if a writer wants to gain a wide audience, he had better avoid emulating them.

That's a lesson I've learned. On the other hand, though, fantasy calls for a distinctive style, a style with a certain indefinable something more, as attested to by Ursula K. Le Guin's "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie." The existence of a book like The Tough Guide to Fantasyland bespeaks a vein of genre fiction that purports to trade in wonder but has actually been drained of all magic, danger, and imagination. So, here's my quandary. How do you retain that aura of mystery and sense of wondrous substantiality while writing in a style that's succinct, artful, and accessible?

Le Guin herself is one of my favorite fantasists in terms of style. Two other post-Tolkien favorites that come to mind are John Crowley and Gene Wolfe. I've often turned to their works for guidance. But where I've really found the answer is Raymond Chandler.

Chandler's writing is highly nuanced and richly textured, but the reader hardly notices it. His sentences are terse, yet packed with color and metaphor. His Los Angeles is a universe in miniature—a fantasy world, almost—a living, breathing force that's anything but a flat backdrop. His pungent, gritty, tarantula-on-an-angel-food-cake style is inimitable, of course, but he solved a lot of the problems that I've been trying to solve. What's more, my stories have a distinctly urban (not "urban fantasy," just urban) feel, borrowing motifs and atmosphere from my favorite film style—film noir. Think Touch of Evil, Kiss Me Deadly, Gun Crazy, Criss Cross, Detour, The Set-Up, Night and the City, Asphalt Jungle, The Maltese Falcon. What better guides than the great writers of the hardboiled school?

So, that's what I've been doing with myself. Writing, thinking, honing my craft, submitting pieces for publication.

Mythago Wood

I first encountered the Matter of Britain through bowdlerized versions of the Arthurian cycle, then through Howard Pyle and, at last, Malory. Malory was where I first struck solid earth, for Pyle was separated from the land of Arthur by an ocean, and his stories take place in a generic fairyland. In Malory one breathes the air and smells the earth of the old island. From him I went on to Layamon and Monmouth, the Mabinogion and Gawain and the Green Knight, Jessie Weston and T. S. Eliot, Mary Stewart and C. S. Lewis. My long-abiding literary love of Britain eventually led me to take a five-week walking tour across the south of England and Wales, visiting Canterbury, the White Cliffs of Dover, the South Downs, Winchester, the Salisbury Plain, Dorset, the Dartmoor, the Cornish coast, Glastonbury, St. David's Head, and the Offa's Dyke path through Tintern and Hay-on-Wye, backpacking more than 150 miles in all.

When it comes to modern fantasy, most Arthurian fare leaves me cold. I mentioned Mary Stewart above; her Merlin series has a richly detailed, strongly local flavor lacking in most other fictionalizations. The quasi-mystical humbug one finds in such works is particularly irksome. Here, though, I may be betraying my bias. Nowadays people are always trying to peel away the layers that have encrusted the legends of Britain, trying to find a basis in history or ritual, trying to get to some solid substance underneath. But in most cases we have little knowledge of what the old pagan rites and beliefs were like; trying to reconstruct them or live them out is mere self-deception. When I was in Glastonbury I saw spiritual hippies ommming in fields around the famous tor and talking about force-lines running through Stonehenge and elsewhere. I wondered how the real Druids would have felt about it all.

The only chance a latter-day searcher-into-ancient-mysteries has of coming anywhere close to the heart of Britain—or of any country—is through a serious contemplation of its land, its what-it-is-in-itself. A tradition is a living force, not something one can just make from scratch. But the land is a kind of tradition, a physical memory. I speak of the land itself, not some self-regarding pantheistic conceptual framework or gratifying pseudo-mythology imposed on the land. The contemplation I'm describing requires solitude, silence, patience, and, possibly, extreme discomfort. Perhaps this is what the young Wordsworth experienced before he began writing about it, trying to distill it for pleasure and profit. "Nutting" and several passages from his Prelude come to mind. Certainly it's what Antony Abbot meant when he spoke of the "book of nature."

I've gotten away from what I meant to say. I began this post intending to write a review of Robert Holdstock's Mythago Wood, which I read recently and very much enjoyed. Suffice it to say that the land—the earth—is very much a living presence in this book. The idea of a wood larger on the inside than on the outside—a wood in which remote antiquity all the way back to the Ice Age still lives on, if one could only find the paths to the heart—this idea, this conceit, strongly appeals to me. It's a book with real substance. A lot of modern fantasy strikes me as a skin-deep, stage-scenery affair. Mythago Wood is something different, something special.

Misbegotten

I apologize to my various imaginary readers for my long absence from this space. However, my time away has not gone to waste. I'm pleased to report that my second piece of fiction, "Misbegotten," is soon to be published in the excellent online fantasy magazine, Beneath Ceaseless Skies. This is my first professional credit.

Raymond Carver on Writing

"Ambition and a little luck are good things for a writer to have going for him. Too much ambition and bad luck, or no luck at all, can be killing. There has to be talent. Some writers have a bunch of talent; I don't know any writers who are without it. But a unique and exact way of looking at things, and finding the right context for expressing that way of looking, that's something else… Every great or even every very good writer makes the world over according to his specifications. It's akin to style, what I'm talking about, but it isn't style alone. It is the writer's particular and unmistakable signature on everything he writes. It is his world and no other. This is one of the things that distinguishes one writer from another. Not talent. There's plenty of that around. But a writer who has some special way of looking at things and who gives artistic expression to that way of looking: that writer may be around for a time."

"I hate tricks. At the first sign of a trick or a gimmick in a piece of fiction, a cheap trick or even an elaborate trick, I tend to look for cover. Tricks are ultimately boring, and I get bored easily, which may go along with my not having much of an attention span. But extremely clever chi-chi writing, or just plain tomfoolery writing, puts me to sleep. Writers don't need tricks or gimmicks or even necessarily need to be the smartest fellows on the block. At the risk of appearing foolish, a writer sometimes needs to be able to just stand and gape at this or that thing—a sunset or an old shoe—in absolute and simple amazement."

"Evan Connell said once that he knew he was finished with a short story when he found himself going through it and taking out commas and then going through the story again and putting commas back in the same places. I like that way of working on something. I respect that kind of care for what is being done. That's all we have, finally, the words, and they had better be the right ones, with the punctuation in the right places so that they can best say what they are meant to say. If the words are heavy with the writer's own unbridled emotions, or if the are imprecise and inaccurate for some other reason—if the words are in any way blurred—the reader's eyes will slide right over them and nothing will be achieved. The reader's own artistic sense will simply not be engaged."

"I like it when there is some feeling of threat or sense of menace in short stories. I think a little menace is fine to have in a story. For one thing, it's good for the circulation. There has to be tension, a sense that something is imminent, that certain things are in relentless motion, or else, most often, there simply won't be a story. What creates tension in a piece of fiction is partly the way the concrete words are linked together to make up the visible action of the story. But it's also the things that are left out, that are implied, the landscape just under the smooth (but sometimes broken and unsettled) surface of things."

"V. S. Pritchett's definition of a short story is 'something glimpsed from the corner of the eye, in passing.' Notice the 'glimpse' part of this. First the glimpse. Then the glimpse given life, turned into something that illuminates the moment and may, if we're lucky—that word again—have even further-ranging consequences and meaning. The short story writer's task is to invest the glimpse with all that is in his power. He'll bring his intelligence and literary skill to bear (his talent), his sense of proportion and sense of the fitness of things: of how things out there really are and how he sees those things—like no one else sees them. And this is done through the use of clear and specific language, language used so as to bring to life the details that will light up the story for the reader. For the details to be concrete and convey meaning, the language must be accurate and precisely given. The words can be so precise they may even sound flat, but they can still carry; if used right, they can hit all the notes."

—Raymond Carver, "On Writing"