Fantasy Cathedrals and McMansions

My post about "serial epic fantasy" a few weeks ago has gotten more (non-robot) hits than most of my recent posts, so I thought I would revisit the topic, which is, after all, a perennial one on this blog. In fact, it goes back to my second post ever, when I threw down my gauntlet before the literary world.

At the time I wrote that, I had just despaired of ever finding an agent or publisher for my gargantuan first novel, which was 150K words after trimming it down by half and seriously boring. It was about autism, autogyros, quantum mechanics, and various characters that eventually found a home in my Enoch stories. At the back of my mind, I knew that it was too inwardly focused to be readable. I ultimately relegated my autistic recluse to the void in favor of a sanguine pugilist who leaps before he looks and basically does everything I would never do.

So that post was (and is) a kind of manifesto. Manifestos are fun, especially when they're full of hyperbole and self-importance. So let's do another! I'll begin with an unapologetic catalog of my twenty favorite fantasy novels, listed in chronological order:

• Phantastes by George MacDonald (1858)
• She by H. Rider Haggard (1887)
• The Time Machine by H. G. Wells (1895)
• The House on the Borderland by William Hope Hodgson (1908)
• The Night Land by William Hope Hodgson (1912)
• A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1912)
• Thuvia, Maid of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1916)
• A Voyage to Arcturus by David Lindsay (1920)
• The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison (1922)
• The King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany (1924) 
• The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath by H. P. Lovecraft (1927)
• At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft (1931)
• Out of the Silent Planet by C. S. Lewis (1938)
• Perelandra by C. S. Lewis (1943)
• Titus Groan by Mervyn Peake (1946)
• Gormenghast by Mervyn Peake (1950)
• The Lord of the Rings by J. R. R. Tolkien (1955)
• The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle (1968)
• Little, Big by John Crowley (1981)
• The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe (1983)
• Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock (1984)

Well, okay, that was twenty-one. To get on that list, you have to have made a permanent impression my imagination, and I have to have reread you as a guilty pleasure at least once. A list of my favorite short fiction would include pieces by George MacDonald, Robert W. Chambers, Arthur Machen, Lord Dunsany, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and C. L. Moore. I tend to gravitate toward the weird and ornate, like "The Repairer of Reputations" or "The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth" or "The Tower of the Elephant" or "The Demon in the Flower."

So I think it's fair to say that I'm biased toward the what came before the Tolkien watershed. When I read what other people have to say about pre-Tolkien novels, I often get the feeling that they're viewed as ungainly precursors, as the dinosaur skeletons at the museum entrance. They're the work of primitives who didn't quite know what they were about, Giottos and Fra Angelicos to our modern Raphaels and Caravaggios. They're tolerated or even admired, but as a kind of academic curiosity that one delves into occasionally as an act of literary penance.

My preferences are quite the opposite. I do read modern fantasy. I discover hidden gems that way. They're out there, to be sure. But my first and only real love is the pre-Tolkien canon. How many times have I read A Voyage to Arcturus or Phantastes or The Worm Ouroboros? Too many to count. If I read modern fantasy, it's because I'm looking for something to satisfy the hunger whetted by these works.

But, more often than not, genre fiction cheats this desire. It's got no bite, no danger, no weirdness. It's tame. To put it in galline terms, it's caponized and clipped. It lacks the grotesque stylistic bosses, the glowing digressions, the awkward framing devices and dumb shows of the classics.

I could point to myriad ways in which the works of the pre-Tolkien canon influenced one another. But each draws far more from philosophy and science and mythology. They were part of a real literary movement rather than a genre. A literary movement is a living thing that grows according to its own inner logic and is necessarily bound in time; a genre is a dead thing, a pigeonhole in a commercial classification system depending on the presence or absence of various material elements. The difference between fantastic literature and a lot of genre fiction is the difference between a Gothic cathedral and a McMansion.

And in case I seem entirely dismissive of more recent efforts, let me emphasize that I'm not talking about everything that's out there right now. I've read things that I've liked very much. But just look at the sheer quantity of it all. The kinds of works I like can't be mass produced or made to order. They're like lightning strikes. And one thing I note about the majority of the authors I listed above is that their primary career was not fiction writing. If it had been, they would have starved.

Let me also emphasize that I'm not into nostalgia. I have no desire to try to "get back" to anything. If a true fantasy novel is to be written in our time, it must take root right here in the twenty-first century, drawing its nourishment from the world around us even if in reaction against it. There are no "good old days" to hearken back to. The world in which fantasy first flourished was a dirty and brutal place, and the master fantasists were people of their time. Even the one author most responsible for creating the modern fantasy novel, the aggressively backward-looking William Morris, was a social activist whose efforts in manufacture reform were echoed in the ultra-modern Bauhaus half a century later.

As Tolkien points out, the Escape for which fantasy is often blamed has "Disgust, Anger, Condemnation, and Revolt" as its companions. True fantasy is not safe. It's revolutionary. But genre fiction can't be revolutionary. It mixes and matches the established tropes, making novel arrangements rather than creating new worlds. It might, if quite certain of its audience, cautiously advance a few progressive or conservative talking points, but it will never ever do anything that makes it unclear which tribe it's supposed to appeal to, because that is the one unforgivable sin.

It's easy enough to talk about all this on my blog, and I do often enough. The quality of my novels is debatable, but at any rate they're out there. Sometimes you just have to get up on a rooftop and shout about what you're doing and why you're doing it.

Plus, the robots were getting kind of rambunctious in my absence. Go away, robots. Dance somewhere else.

Related: A Festival of Wrap-Around Cover Art

Serial Epic Fantasy?

I mentioned in my last post that I've been finding epic fantasy somewhat boring lately. That's got me thinking about what epic fantasy is (or ought to be) and why precisely I'm finding it boring. Unfortunately, I'm something of a dinosaur (or would it be a paleontologist?) in my tastes, and anything I say is automatically about thirty years out of date, if not more.

(But wait. I thought fantasy was literature for the dinosaurs. When did it become all edgy and contemporary and topical? Wasn't there a time when fantasists prided themselves on looking backward? I guess that's a topic for another post, though. Back to epic fantasy.)

I've been reading Stephen Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane this summer. It's been slow going. I tried reading it once a good while ago, but put it down because of That One Scene. But it's a fairly well-respected book all the same, and an example of post-Tolkien fantasy that didn't fall into the cookie cutter approach of some other authors at the time. (You know who you are.) So now I'm giving it another go.

And I'm finding it kind of dull.

I don't think my problem is with the novel, exactly, but with the subgenre in general, or maybe with myself. There was a time when I ate epic fantasies up. The thicker the better. But I realized one day that the particular series I was reading at the time wasn't going anywhere, and that there was no reason the author couldn't keep spinning them out forever. What got me started reading doorstops and paper weights was, of course, The Lord of the Rings. But LOTR had three things that these others lacked: a beginning, a middle, and an end. It had a sense of wholeness, of completeness. And that's rare in the subgenre called epic fantasy.

Which is kind of ironic. An epic, properly so-called, is a narrative recounting the deeds of larger-than-life characters taking part in great events of universal import. There's an expectation of roundness, of unity and completeness. Think of the Iliad. Its action take place in a matter of weeks, but its perspective encompasses the entire Trojan War, from the judgment of Paris to the razing of the city. Any other epic worthy of the name is similarly comprehensive.

The two great original works of epic fantasy of the twentieth century – The Worm Ouroboros and The Lord of the Rings – take that approach, though describing the end rather than the middle. The Book of the New Sun, which in my opinion is up there with those two, is more like the Iliad in that it narrates the middle of its great events, pointing toward the end without altogether explicating it. Afterwards, each of these authors continued to write in his invented world in various ways, but none sought to actually add to his epic, because it was clearly finished.

Obviously, the more commercial aspects of the fantasy genre militate against that kind of completeness. What people call "epic fantasy" nowadays is often really serial fantasy, which in a way is the opposite of the epic. An epic requires wholeness, with build-up to climax and aftermath. It can't just be arbitrarily prolonged like a soap opera.

Of course, it's premature for me to pin all this on the Thomas Covenant novels. They do seem to have a certain wholeness, though they're also a kind of commentary on the subgenre to which they belong. And I'll admit that I'm interested in seeing where it's all going, at least as far as the main character is concerned, despite my utter contempt for him. I couldn't care less about the Land. But maybe I'm supposed to not care.

Or maybe, like Thomas, I've just gotten too cynical to care. That's a scary thought.

Cf. my long-ago post Literary Fantasy and Ecological Comedy.

Gene Wolfe and A. E. van Vogt on the Soul

I have a number of times made known my great admiration of the stories and early novels of A. E. van Vogt. My favorite of his works are the two Null-A books, The World of Null-A (1948) and The Pawns of Null-A (1956; a.k.a. The Players of Null-A). My love is not shared by everyone. Indeed, I am quite aware of their shortcomings myself. But to me van Vogt's best works are a kind of poetry, despite a prose style that is at times almost hilariously awkward. I'm drawn to their naïve earnestness, and also the fact that main plot-movers are philosophical principles (however inadequately digested by Mr. van Vogt) rather than gadgetry.

I remember finding The World of Null-A at a used bookstore (called Treasure Aisles, I believe) in college, and taking it home, and reading it. It was a refreshing, exhilarating experience.

Gosseyn was crawling frantically along the grass when the first bullet actually struck him. It hit one shoulder and sent him spinning into the path of a burning energy beam. His clothes and flesh flared in an insanity of flame; and then he had rolled over and the bullets were focused again. They began to rip him apart as he burned with an incandescent fury. 

The unbearable part was that he clung to consciousness. He could feel the unrelenting fire and the bullets searching through his writhing body. The blows and the flame tore at his vital organs, at his legs, his heart, and his lungs even after he had stopped moving. His last dim thought was the infinitely sad, hopeless realization that now he would never see Venus and its unfathomed mysteries. 

Somewhere along there, death came.

Curtains for Gosseyn I. But then, without a word of explanation, at the beginning of the next chapter:

A curious, heavy sound impinged upon Gosseyn's attention.

As I said, van Vogt's best novels tend to explore innovations, not in technology, but in ideas. That's one of the things I like about him. One thing that often comes up in his writing is the relationship between identity and memory.

In The World of Null-A, I think it's fair to say that identity is portrayed as neither more nor less than memory. The Games Machine explains the method of posthumous transference to Gosseyn II, saying that "the death of one body is recorded on an electronic receiver, which then triggers the new body into consciousness." Prescott later tells Gosseyn that if "two energies can be attuned on a twenty-decimal approximation of similarity [units???], the greater will bridge the gap of space between them just as if there were no gap, although the juncture is accomplished at finite speeds." He goes on: "How do you explain the fact that you have in your mind the details of what Gossen I did and thought? You must have been attuned, you and he; in fact, it is the only theoretically sure method of thought transmission – you have to do it with yourself."

Thus memory and identity in The World of Null-A: the "soul" (if we may call it such) consists of a certain set of memories and traits. Copy those into a new body, and you have the very person, continued.

Now, when I blogged about van Vogt's The Book of Ptath last year, I noted a number of resemblances to the world of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. Having just finished reading that work's sequel and coda, The Urth of the New Sun (1987), which is just as rich, profound, and delightfully elliptical as the rest, I'm struck by another parallel with van Vogt's writing. Several, actually, but we'll only discuss one here.

[Spoiler alert!!!]

The reader eventually discovers that the protagonist, Severian, is going through a Gosseyn-like succession of bodies. Each body is apparently formed by directed energies and converted into a substantial form through the subsequent consumption of stable matter.

"What we did here for you, Severian, the mighty Tzadkiel accomplished there, remembrance taking from your dead mind to build your mind and you anew." 

"Do you mean that when I stood before Tzadkiel's Seat of Justice, I was an eidolon Tzadkiel himself had made?" 

Ossipago muttered, "Made's too strong a term, if I have as much access to your tongue as I like to think. Made tangible, possibly." 

I looked from him to Famulimus for enlightenment. 

"You were reflected thought in your dead mind. He fixed the image, made it whole, mended the fatal wound you'd borne." 

"Made me a walking, speaking picture of myself."

They go on:

"But I'm dead – not even here, dead back there on Tzadkiel's ship."

"Your twin lies dead there," Barbatus told me. "As another lies dead here. I might say in passing that if he weren't dead, we couldn't have done what we did, because every living being is more than mere matter." He paused and glanced toward Famulimus for help, but received none. "What do you know of the anima?" 

I thought then of Ava, and what she had said to me: "You're a materialist, like all ignorant people. But your materialism doesn't make materialism true." Little Ava had died with Foila and the rest. "Nothing," I muttered. "I know nothing of the anima." 

"In a way, it's like a line of verse. Famulimus, what was the one you quoted to me?" 

His wife sang, "Awake! For Morning in the Bowl of Night, Has flung the Stone that puts the Stars to Flight." [The first line of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyam. – raphordo]

"Yes," I said. "I understand." 

Barbatus pointed. "Suppose I were to write those lines upon that wall – and then to write them again upon that other wall. Which would be the true lines?" 

"Both," I said. "And neither. The true lines are not writing, nor speech either. I can't say what they are." 

"That is the way of the anima, as I understand it. It was written there." He indicated the dead man. "Now it is written in you."

Perhaps I'm seeing allusions where there are none (I have a knack for that), but in these explanations I find a gentle rebuttal to van Vogt's low-minded mechanical transference of memory data, framed as a step up to the level of metaphysics. Ironically, one has only to read Aristotle's De Anima to see how far short A. E. van Vogt fell in understanding questions involved in the nature of what is commonly called the soul.

As for Wolfe, as always, I find him a rich source of ideas for writing about eternal questions like the immortality of the soul without veering into scientific reductionism on one side or outright religiosity on the other. His explanation here strikes me as being quite close to the Aristotelian (and Scholastic) idea of the soul as the "form" of the human person.

I do dabble in such philosophy from time to time, but for me the real lesson here is a stylistic one. With a little metaphysics, Wolfe is able to take his characters through mind-blowing experiences and transfigurations without violating their basic humanity.

Two Hundred Million A.D.

As I've mentioned several times, A. E. van Vogt, the famous "pygmy with a giant typewriter," is my favorite golden-age science fiction author. His best novels bear multiple readings, partly because they're so rich in ideas and settings, partly because they're damnably confusing. They're bold yet weirdly naïve, headlong plunges through time and space, peopled with dunderheaded supermen and strong-minded beauties and towering arch-villains, littered with unbearable solecisms and unmotivated actions, touched with sweeping grandeur.

I just finished a repeat visit to Two Hundred Million A.D. (a.k.a., The Book of Ptath), serialized in 1943, published as a novel in 1947. My copy, shown to the right, was printed in 1963.

One thing that strikes me upon this re-reading is that, from a stylistic point of view, the book is very badly written. To wit:

…for a moment he had an enormous, an almost owlish conviction that he had picked a fatal flaw in the whole story.

An owlish conviction? What does that mean, exactly? We seem to be talking about a conviction that is enormous, yes, but, what's more, it's so very enormous that it's almost owlish. As in…like unto an owl?

And then there's this:

These rebels were right, basically. No group had ever been braver, defying an unkillable woman and a religio-slave set-up of temple potentates more powerful than anything that had ever existed anywhere.

An unkillable woman and a religio-slave set-up. That made it into a published novel? It sounds like something I'd use as a placeholder in a rough draft for a rough draft, hoping I wouldn't die before I could revise it.

The plot, on the other hand, is fairly incomprehensible. Restrictions on action shift from paragraph to paragraph. Characters make bold, arbitrary resolutions, then abandon them on the next page. Time crawls by, and then, between two neighboring lines of dialogue, a month elapses. Plot holes yawn like black abysses, unsuspected by their author. Plot points emerge like ships from a dark, foggy night, and vanish vaguely to aft. The whole thing hangs together with a kind of murky dream-logic, not making sense if you look at it as a whole, but seeming to make sense from page to page. Kind of.

And yet, I like it. Honestly, I'd rather read it than a lot of things that make more sense. In Imaginary Worlds, Lin Carter gushes about it on pp. 85 – 86, winding up by calling it van Vogt's "single best novel." He gets a number of details wrong, in typical Lin Carter fashion, but gives a good overall summary. I can't say I agree with his assessment – certainly I'd rank the Null-A books, the Weapons Shops books, Slan, and The Voyage of the Space Beagle as far superior – but it's definitely worth a read.

There's the setting, for one thing. The action spans two continents and the isthmus joining them, moving through jungles, rivers of boiling mud, smoking volcanoes, and stupendous cities, two hundred million years in the future. The earth, it's suggested, is exhausted of ores. Battles are fought with crude weapons of varnished wood and carved stone, but high technology is also present. The human population is in the tens or hundreds of billions. Once-human goddesses pit armies of loyalists and rebels against one another in a strange game where mastery is the prize. In a curious reversion to geological antiquity, the southern supercontinent, where most of the story takes place, is known as Gonwonlane (Gondwanaland), and the sea adjoining it, Teths (Tethys). The armies employ prehistoric-seeming beasts like elephantine grimbs and leather-winged screers.

As a matter of fact, I'm struck by how many material elements of The Book of Ptath remind me of Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. I wonder if it served as a partial inspiration?

The protagonist is the god Ptath, returned to the present from a sojourn among the humans of the past, his most recent incarnation being Peter Holroyd, a soldier and casualty of World War II. At the opening he is blank-minded and physically inexorable; later on the Holroyd psyche takes over for some reason that I don't quite understand.

Ptath's age-long merging with the human race has something Christ-like about it, in a Gnostic sort of way, an attempt to grow in compassion and root out the sort of divine cruelty that has conquered the goddess Ineznia. But religion, though the source of Ptath's power, is treated in a coldly scientific, utilitarian way. "Religion is fear," he says on the penultimate page.

Power accrues to the three divinities through the use of prayer-sticks, but only women can pray to the god (Ptath), while men pray to the goddesses (Ineznia and L'onee). This god-power consists of the ability to possess other people (though only of the same sex) and, eventually, depending on the piety of the populace, the ability to transport oneself bodily through space. No, it doesn't make sense to me, either. And van Vogt is, as ever, on the side of the superman.

But still, look at the sheer number of ideas we have thrown together here. Any one of them could have been the basis for an entire novel. As usual, I find myself slightly frustrated that van Vogt didn't develop his speculations more fully or make a better attempt at narrative coherence. But it's hard to think of another science fiction author so useful to steal from, or (for me at least), so enjoyable to read.

Works & Days

In the midst of various mundane tasks, such as working toward tenure and preparing for a coming baby, I've had little opportunity to post lately, but, naturally, I've continued to write and to paint. If I didn't do these things I would swiftly find myself in the Slough of Despond. In the past I've tended to be a single-focus kind of person, and this lifestyle of getting up early, painting and/or writing, going to work (until nine p.m. a couple days out of the week), then coming home, spending time with the fam if possible, and staying up late to paint and/or write again, does not come natural to me. Somehow, though, I feel that if I were under less pressure and had more free time, I would get less done, not more.

In the midst of all of this I have found some time to read. I recently finished Gene Wolfe's Book of the Long Sun, and, surprisingly, was somewhat disappointed by it. I've read his Book of the New Sun avidly several times, and have written about it once or twice, but somehow Long Sun never really clicked with me.

For one thing, the plot moved forward at a glacial pace, reminding me of those anxiety dreams where you're about some task but nothing seems to get anywhere, and strange, irrelevant events happen for no reason at all, leading you further and further from your goal. It's written in an elliptical style – and this style is one of the things I love about Gene Wolfe – but I didn't feel like the parts really coalesced. The fourth and final volume just kind of falls apart, with long, long scenes where people ramble and ruminate and discuss and seem to forget what they were talking about, separated by scenes of action that are hinted at but not shown. The gaps get longer and longer, as though Mr. Wolfe were under contract to write four volumes but found the story stretching beyond these limits, as can easily happen.

Another thing that made it a difficult read was the constantly shifting viewpoint. Half the third volume is spent shifting to and from a party of people wandering around in dark tunnels without much happening in each scene. The book has a tremendous number of characters (there's a catalog of proper names) and I had a hard time keeping track of who was who, partly because I went a number of months between volumes two and three. The whole thing has a rather Dickensian feel, as opposed to the Melvillesque feel of New Sun. It reminded me a bit of David Copperfield or Bleak House or something like that.

The world of the Whorl is certainly an intriguing one to explore. That's what really sustained me through to the end, I think. It's a generation ship, but it's unclear how much the people inside it, who live in a Balkanized assortment of city-states, really understand or guess. The slow revelation of the Whorl's true nature is what makes the book an interesting read, but it closes without a clear resolution or elucidation, not even elliptical. New Sun closes with all lines converging upon an as-yet unrealized point; Long Sun just seems to end with a big splat. But then again, possibly I just need to read it again. It's quite possible that I'm simply missing the point.

The protagonist, Patera Silk, begins as a priest in the official pagan religion, dutifully obedient to the pantheon of AI gods that preside over the Whorl, but is enlightened and increasingly drawn to the Outsider, whose identity I'll let you guess. The details of life in his "manteion" are drawn from the life of the Catholic parish priest. Aside from the whole blood-sacrifice thing, he could be my own parish priest, who inhabits a tiny set of rooms at the back of the parish office with a temporary parochial vicar, and works with three sisters (our sibyls) who live in a house a block away and run a center that provides tutoring to at-risk students. Anyway, Silk is an interesting, charismatic character, who falls in love with and marries a shallow, unfaithful, somewhat cruel narcissist. Strange.

Mr. Wolfe's next series, The Book of the Short Sun, apparently continues the narrative to some extent, but sounds like it has a style more closely approaching that of New Sun, so I suspect I'll like it more. I've tried to find it in used bookstores, to no avail.

On the reading-books-out-loud front, I'm currently working through George MacDonald's The Princess and the Goblin with my kids. I always use my four-year-old daughter to gauge our books, because if she's interested then she'll soak the story up like a sponge and be able to repeat every minor detail weeks or months afterward, but if she finds it boring (which is to say, incomprehensible), then she just squirms around and makes trouble and can't recall anything afterward. Well, Princess is definitely a hit. My son is also into it. The "scary" chapters simply terrify them (naturally, I ham it up a bit), and the other night I had to spend time comforting my son as I tucked him in, because our chapter had ended with the hero, Curdie the miner boy, locked in a room with an arrow wound and a high fever. So you see, it's very real to them.

It has me thinking. I've mentioned that we read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe over the summer, and both my kids loved it. My daughter remembers all these crazy little details that we haven't talked about since. And she was the White Witch for Halloween. (Obviously she wasn't going to be someone boring like Lucy or Susan.) My son was Curdie, pick-ax and all. They chose their costumes for themselves, so clearly these books in particular have made an impression.

But Prince Caspian and Voyage of the Dawn Treader? Meh. I've made it no secret that I've never cared for Prince Caspian, but Voyage was definitely one of my favorite books when growing up. The reading level is higher than Wardrobe, one might argue, but I personally don't see a great difference in difficulty. And look at Princess, which is a Victorian novel and quite wordy. (Though I cut out the annoying meta passages that address the reader, of which there are few, thankfully.) So, why exactly are Wardrobe and Princess hits, while Caspian and Voyage are not?

I'll have to ponder that one. But this I can say. My kids love a straightforward, linear story that states the facts and events simply and plainly, without cute self-referential fripperies, and they love dialogue in which people mean what they say and say what they mean, and they love curious little details and descriptions that combine the familiar with the strange, like a fire of glowing roses. Oh, and they hate being patronized.

On a wholly unrelated point, my blog is about to reach its twenty thousandth visitor. To all you loyal readers, occasional visitors, random strangers, roving bots, Ukrainian referrer spam, and the rest, my humble thanks is owed.

Getting There

I posted recently about my chosen vein of speculative fiction, namely, planetary romance, or the sword-and-planet novel. One peculiarity of early practitioners of this high and lonely art is the variety of means they employed in getting their protagonists to the Other Side.

Among the earliest we have Jules Verne (From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel) and H. G. Wells (The First Men in the Moon), both of whom use mechanical means. Verne, who was obsessed with gadgets and "realism," has his travelers fired out of a cannon (and, truth be told, they never actually land on the moon), while Wells, who was more interested in ideas and settings, uses a rather absurd physical artifice, giving mere lip-service to theoretical constraints, much as he does in The Time-Machine. Verne, I believe, took him to task for this, but wrongly, to my mind – I find that I can forgive the author any amount of ridiculousness as to means of transport, so long as his style is sufficient to bear it along, and he attends to realism once we get there. Chandler wrote that plausibility is mostly a matter of style, and I agree with him.

And anyway, look at the historical antecedents, such as they are. Ariosto has his hero drawn by hippogriffs to the moon, and Dante is conducted by celestial spirits. Perseus – the archetypal voyager to the Other Side and slayer of fearsome alien foes – flies on winged sandals lent him by the gods, while St. Brendan executes his wonder-voyage through the North Atlantic in a flimsy leather coracle. The whole point is to get there, never mind how.

David Lindsay follows Wells rather than Verne in the absurdity of his conveyance in A Voyage to Arcturus, but the account is mysterious and quite compelling. Once again, I find it easy to suspend my disbelief in the hands of a competent storyteller. And, once we're there, we're caught up in the protagonist's physical and spiritual reactions to the alien landscape of Tormance, and Earth is all but forgotten.

Other writers didn't trouble themselves to employ even the most superficial of mechanical means. In The Worm Ouroboros, E. R. Eddison has Lessingham borne to Mercury in a hippogriff-drawn chariot conducted by a wise martlet (after which he was promptly forgotten). On the other side of the Atlantic we have Edgar Rice Burroughs, whose John Carter has only to look upon the Red Planet with a certain measure of longing to find himself there, though stark naked and seemingly in a different body. Otis Adelbert Kline, a Burroughs imitator from the thirties, uses telepathic body-exchange to get his down-and-out character to Mars. His artifice is less successful, in that we're apparently expected to forget about the fate of the Martian prince trapped in the dispossessed, jilted hero's body back on earth.

Most of the examples we've cited so far have the device of a framing story that involves the principals but is quickly forgotten, which (to me) adds a certain charm not to be found in other veins of literature. Here, then, are the keynotes of classic planetary romance:

1. The main structure of the tale is that of an everyman observer in an alien milieu.
2. The observer must be someone with whom we share rapport, hence must originate from Earth or an Earth-based society in something close to our own day and age.
3. The observer must be immersed in the alien milieu, hence must effectively be cut off from mundane society – marooned, as it were. The milieu must be a closed environment, like a desert island.
4. Because it's the immersion that matters, the mode of conveyance is of little import. The simpler and quicker, the better.

Some time after the "classic" period, C. S. Lewis wrote two planetary romances, consciously using both mechanical and spiritual means. In Out of the Silent Planet, Ransom is kidnapped by a rogue professor and his gentleman accomplice and taken to Mars in a spaceship. The ship is just as absurd as anything in Wells or Lindsay, but much more artfully introduced and described. The interplanetary voyage itself is starkly beautiful; I can't think of any other description of space that compares with it. In Perelandra Lewis doesn't bother with technology at all, and has his hero conveyed to Venus in a stone sarcophagus carried by angels. By his own account, this was inspired by a reading of A Voyage to Arcturus. Again, the point is to get there, never mind how.

Later writers were apparently uncomfortable with such flights of fancy, I suppose because the growing canon of science fiction and the advances in rocketry were daily making this scientifictional license less acceptable and less necessary. The protagonists in works like Leigh Brackett's The Sword of Rhiannon, Ursula Le Guin's Rocannon's World, and Frank Herbert's Dune get there by means that are purely mechanical and (within the genre) plausible. So, sadly, we have no more hippogriffs, astral projection, angelic sarcophagi, telepathic mind-exchanges, or backyard rocketships. They've lost something essential, though, because a keynote of the subgenre is that travel to the Other Side has to be exceptional. Otherwise we just have space opera or some other form of science fiction.

Some "planetary romances," instead of taking place elsewhere, take place elsewhen, in the very far future. Examples include H. G. Wells' The Time-Machine, William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land, A. E. van Vogt's The Book of Ptath (a.k.a. Two Hundred Million A.D.), Brian Aldiss' The Long Afternoon of Earth, and Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. The keynotes are much the same. There is usually some kind of framing story and a fanciful mode of conveyance, or at least (as in Wolfe's case) some playful description of how the account was obtained.

For me personally, what really defines the subgenre is the sense of remoteness, of otherness. I like an observer I can identify with, or at least some kind of reference point with what I'm familiar with, however tenuous, but equally important is my total immersion in the other sphere. These two factors go hand in hand. A novel taking place in some other planet not linked to our own in any way would be out-and-out fantasy (like The Dark Crystal, say); a novel taking place in a planet linked to our own but not utterly severed in time or space is science fiction or alternate history.

Planetary romance: it's its own thing.

The Claw of the Conciliator

This is a continuation of my previous post on Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun. I was commenting on objections to the book, and had just suggested a parallel with the Grail cycle, with the Claw of the Conciliator as the "grail" that moves the plot along.

It's interesting, by the bye, that the Claw only performs "natural" miracles. It cures diseases, heals wounds, and raises the dead, but has little or no effect on the artificially enhanced beauty of Jolenta and the like. The miracle that most stands out to me is the changing of water into wine at the inn in Saltus. It is, of course, an echo of Christ's first miracle at Cana. In The Spirit of Medieval Philosophy, Etienne Gilson, speaking of the attitude of the medievals toward such phenomena, has this to say:

In a way everything is a miracle. At the marriage of Cana Jesus made water into wine and everybody was astounded; but rain becomes wine in our vines every day, and we take it all as a matter of course. Nevertheless, it is God Who creates the rain and the vine and the wine; but He does it regularly, and we get so accustomed to it that we cease to wonder. Again, He speaks, and one rises from the dead and the whole countryside flock to see; but men are born every day in the usual manner and we enter the birth in the civil register as if it were the most natural thing in the world… Miraculous phenomena are not necessarily more admirable in themselves than the daily spectacle of nature; the government of the world, at once as a whole and in all its least details, is a much more wonderful thing than the feeding of the five thousand with five loaves.

He elsewhere notes:

The true Christian feeling for nature is that which finds expression throughout the Psalms, and, above all, in the Canticle of the Three Children in the fiery furnace: Benedicite opera Domini Domino; laudate et superexultate eum in saecula. And after many centuries St. Francis of Assisi will echo that song in his Laudes and the Canticle of Brother Sun, wherein not only water, earth, and air, and stars, but the very death of the body itself, will receive their meed of praise and benediction. If anywhere the heart of man entered into fraternal communion with all that lives and breathes and has being, most assuredly it did so there; for this purely Christian soul it was altogether one and the same thing to love the works of God and to love God.

This is the very spirit that runs through BOTNS from beginning to end.

What struck me on the beach and it struck me indeed, so that I staggered as at a blow—was that if the Eternal Principle had rested in that curved thorn I had carried about my neck for so many leagues, and if it now rested in the new thorn (perhaps the same thorn) I had only now put there, then it might rest in anything, and in fact probably did rest in everything, in every thorn on every bush, in every drop of water in the sea. The thorn was a sacred Claw because all thorns were sacred Claws; the sand in my boots was sacred because it came from a beach of sacred sand. The cenobites treasured up the relics of the sannyasins because the sannyasins had approached the Pancreator. But everything had approached and indeed touched the Pancreator, because everything had dropped from his hand. Everything was a relic. All the world was a relic. I drew off my boots, that had traveled with me so far, and threw them into the waves that I might not walk shod on holy ground. [The Citadel of the Autarch]

Here Severian echoes Moses before the burning bush—recognizing that every bush is a burning bush—and also Francis, the barefoot friar whose optimism was equaled only by his stern asceticism, as well as Augustine of Hippo, after whose Confessions his personal chronicle is perhaps modeled:

In loving you, what do I love? No physical beauty, no temporal glory, no radiance of light that commends itself to these eyes of mine; no sweet melody of songs tuned to every mode, no soft scent of flowers or of ointments or of perfumes, no manna, no honey, no limbs that can receive corporal embrace; yet I do love some kind of light, some kind of voice, some kind of fragrance, some kind of food, some kind of embrace, when I love my God, who is light, voice, fragrance, food, embrace to my inner man…

I questioned the physical world concerning my God, and it replied to me, "I am not he, but it is he that made me." I questioned the earth, and it said, "I am not he"; and all that was in it confessed likewise. I questioned the sea and the depths, and all living things that creep, and they replied, "We are not your God; look above us." I questioned the winds that blow, and the whole air and all its indwellers said, "Anaximenes is wrong; we are not God." I questioned the sky, the sun, the moon, the stars: "Nor are we the God whom you seek," said they. And I said to all these things that surround the doors of my flesh, "Tell me about my God, that which you are not; tell me something of him." They cried out with a great voice, "It was he that made us." My questioning was the concentration of my mind, and their response was their beauty. [Augustine's Confessions, Book X, trans. Philip Burton]

After reading a number of bad reviews, I begin to wonder if the issue isn't partly a matter of prejudice. I'm reminded of C. N. Manlove's study (Modern Fantasy), which finds The Lord of the Rings and Perelandra to be unsuccessful, while books like Phantastes and Titus Groan are held up as successful. Never mind that the former are perennial favorites available in any bookstore, whereas the latter are hardly read anymore. The cause, he's forced to conclude (after some fairly tortuous criticism), is religion:

[O]nly unprejudiced realists can write fully imaginative fantasy; only those who know one world thoroughly can make another with the inner consistency of reality.

And only those who eschew dogma are unprejudiced realists who know the world, because dogma is prejudiced and unreal and ignorant. I'm not going to throw myself into that fray because I don't like writing about religion per se on this blog, but I will suggest that this attitude seems more likely to be an a priori opinion than a reasoned conclusion. The notion that Tolkien's fantasy is not "fully imaginative" when compared to Peake's is laughable. But to those who prefer the joy and the hope, the grief and the anguish of Middle Earth to the dreary pointlessness of Gormenghast Castle and the zero-dimensional caricatures that inhabit it, Manlove has this to say:

It is almost worth…the failings of The Lord of the Rings to have that one frail, beautiful vision of the vanished garden in Lothlórien. But the word is 'almost': one must leave to the cultists the readiness to dispense with [what makes a successful novel].

Indeed. You know, I find books like The Left Hand of Darkness and A Voyage to Arcturus and VALIS and The Worm Ouroboros and Mythago Wood and Hart's Hope every bit as enjoyable as (say) The Lord of the Rings or The Book of the New Sun. A writer reveals herself in her writing, whether she wants to or not; if she holds a belief, religious or otherwise, then that gets woven in there with the rest. But the end is not the communication of an idea or an opinion. The end of the novel (unless it is a failure, as Perelandra to some extent is) is a kind of beauty, and this beauty is the beauty of truth only secondarily. It can be entered into by anyone, but you have to submit to its rules and make yourself vulnerable for the moment. I admit that this is not always easy. But it has this tendency: it makes you more humane.

As far as Wolfe goes, it's clear that it really is his confessional status that bothers some people, and not the book itself, because its symbolism is as pagan as anything. For that matter, Tolkien's mythopoeic ouevre isn't as Catholic as is always made out—he departed from received dogma on at least one important point, and was taken to task for it—while Lewis' stories are strongly neoplatonist. These writers are being found wanting because of something extrinsic to their works.

We all have this tendency to get trapped in our little ghettos, me as much as anyone else; but insofar as I've limited my horizons to what I'm comfortable with, I've become less of a person. That's something I seem to have to discover again and again.

The Book of the New Sun

My wife and I read together a lot. It's amazing when I think about it what we've gotten through this way. Long works like The Lord of the Rings, Don Quixote, Emma, The Brothers Karamazov, David Copperfield, and The Worm Ouroboros; short works like Heart of Darkness, The Time Machine, The Big Sleep, The Man Who Was Thursday, and Our Man in Havanna. She used to teach elementary school, and we've read a lot of juvenile fiction, too, like the Curdie books, Island of the Blue Dolphins, The Wind in the Willows, The Neverending Story, and Lang's fairy tale collections. As you can probably tell, our tastes differ somewhat. Sometimes we read nonfiction, although we often don't finish this, usually because of my short attention span. It's easier to come back to something after having laid it aside for awhile when you're reading on your own than when you're reading aloud with someone else.

This summer we've been reading Gene Wolfe's Book of the New Sun, which is appropriate as he recently received the SWFA Grand Master award. I've read it before; this is her first time. It's a good book to read aloud because of its formal voice and attention to language. I suppose that's why we tend to go through a lot of nineteenth-century literature together—choppy dialogue and stylistic experimentation don't lend themselves to vocalization. Actually, in order to really appreciate beautiful writing, I find that I have to read it aloud; my pace makes me miss a lot otherwise. Conversely, bad writing becomes painfully apparent this way.

BOTNS is one of those books that divide people. Some think it's one of the great novels of modern times; others just don't get it. Unsurprisingly, it garners more stars on Goodreads than Moby-Dick, and the reviews are really rather similar. People who don't like it find the plot too meandering, the action too halting, the ruminations too digressive; people who like it have a hard time giving a single, coherent reason. Everyone who reads Moby-Dick and hates it takes great pains to make it clear that they get it—understand the symbolism and allusions and so forth—only that it doesn't impress them. But "getting" a book in the sense that you know all the stuff the endnotes would tell you isn't really getting it at all. There's a landscape here, and you have to live in it. You have to have come to love the cadences of the King James Bible, been daunted by the cruelty of the Old Testament, set yourself up against Nature in hate and fear, looked into the maw of a universe without God, been swayed by the music of Pantheism. It isn't a story, for God's sake. It's a monument. Much the same can be said of BOTNS.

So, first let me offer some faltering explanations of why I like the book. After that I'll discuss a few objections.

To begin with, I've written elsewhere about how much I admire the vocabulary. It's eminently suited to the story, which takes place in a Dying Earth so far in the future that the only productive mining is in the "hills" of heaped remnants of previous civilizations, the great city is a world unto itself tapering into ruins at its extremities, and exposed strata in the mountains consist of layers of million-year-old human artifacts. Wolfe has a way, too, through careful word choice and image-painting, of making you think you understand something—the nature of a building or a person, perhaps—and then dashing it to pieces by the narrator's casual mention of some minor detail. For example, you realize only gradually that the Citadel in which the story begins is in reality a collection of ancient space crafts. The vertigo of "time's abyss" (as The Encyclopedia of Fantasy has it) occurs too many times to count.

The structure of the book is that of a traveler's tale. Such stories bore some people to tears, but I find them profoundly enjoyable when done well. This one is done well. Its cast of disappearing, reappearing characters reminds me, oddly enough, of the anime cartoon Belle and Sebastian, which I watched on TV when I was in kindergarten but haven't seen since. It also contains numerous tales-with-the-tale, much like Moby-Dick, something that, again, isn't to everyone's taste, but is to mine. A couple of the stories are far-future retellings of current tales (Theseus and the Minotaur, Mowgli's Brothers). It is, in general, as profoundly erudite a piece of speculative fiction as you will ever find.

Objections to BOTNS fall into several categories. Some people take offense at the fact that the book doesn't spell everything out. Some reviewers have concluded that BOTNS is little more than an immense puzzle for the reader to solve. Admittedly, the book does contain many puzzles. Personally, from a stylistic point of view, I appreciate it that Wolfe didn't clog his story with infodumps. I mean, the infodumps (and, in the later volumes, the synopses) are there, but you have to put them together yourself. It's really rather artfully done. It's as it would be if Tolkien had written The Lord of the Rings by taking Frodo from his front step to Rivendell, with no "Shadow of the Past" or Council of Elrond, ending with his acceptance of the quest for Mount Doom. No appendices, no backstory: the history of the One Ring—including Frodo's destiny—is to be pieced together by the attentive reader from an assortment of hints and allusions. They are, of course, vastly different works, but have this in common: verisimilitude. LOTR purports to be a version of the Red Book of Westmarch, a chronicle, while BOTNS is presented as Severian's confessions.

Other people get angry about the treatment of women in Wolfe's Urth, as if this is his coda for how he thinks women ought to be treated. One reviewer lists all the rights women in Urth fail to enjoy as though they are Wolfe's crimes against humanity, ending with a heartfelt "f*** you." It's strange. Would they feel the same way about a historically accurate novel set in (say) Imperial China? I mean, setting a story in a milieu in which women (and people in general) don't enjoy basic rights and privileges doesn't make the author an apologist for it.

Of course, some authors might be accused of taking a little too much pleasure in the mistreatment of female characters. John Norman comes to mind. I personally can't bring myself to read Stephen Donaldson's Lord Foul's Bane because of the rape scene at the beginning. But I don't get same feeling from BOTNS. Severian certainly beds a lot of women, and some people argue that that's chauvinism right there, in that the author is making all the women want the protagonist. However, he also makes monstrous undines and masked hierodules want the protagonist. So, perhaps it serves a thematic purpose.

And what might that purpose be? Given that Severian's predecessor is an impotent androgyne, and that Urth is dying of exhaustion and sterility, perhaps his prodigious virility and attractiveness signify his role as the one who is to bring the New Sun. Actually, the book practically says as much in one of the final chapters:

If I am he who is to renew the youth of the sun with the White Fountain of which I have been told, may it not be that I have been given, almost unconsciously (if that expression may be used), the attributes of life and light that will belong to the new sun?

Again, time is spoken of as a tapestry woven from many threads, and Severian's particular course seemingly leads to a planet inhabited by green men who live by drinking in the rays of the sun. He aids a green man sent back to his own time and is aided by him in turn. As is well known, the Green Man is a personification of fertility.

Severian is, in fact, a Grail Knight, in the sense of From Ritual to Romance and The Waste Land. Remember that the "grail" of Wolfram von Eschenbach's version is a mysterious stone, not unlike the miracle-performing Claw of the Conciliator carried by Severian through most of the story.

Well, this is getting to be a long post, so I'll continue in another.

The Libraries of Faerie, Babel, and Urth

There was a time, perhaps ten or fifteen years ago, when I often read George MacDonald. The strain of gnostic mysticism that runs through nineteenth-century arts and letters appealed to me in his novels. Phantastes was, of course, my favorite, but I read Lilith several times as well. It's an interesting point that each of these novels—written at different stages of MacDonald's life—contain a large library with occult contents, secret rooms, and ill-defined boundaries, a library in which the protagonist finds himself as an alien in a wilderness. Here Anodos describes the Palace of Faerie:

The library was a mighty hall, lighted from the roof, which was formed of something like glass, vaulted over in a single piece, and stained throughout with a great mysterious picture in gorgeous colouring. The walls were lined from floor to roof with books and books: most of them in ancient bindings, but some in strange new fashions which I had never seen, and which, were I to make the attempt, I could ill describe… Over some parts of the library, descended curtains of silk of various dyes, none of which I ever saw lifted while I was there; and I felt somehow that it would be presumptuous in me to venture to look within them.

And Mr. Vane here describes the library bequeathed to him at the beginning of Lilith:

The library, although duly considered in many alterations of the house and additions to it, had nevertheless, like an encroaching state, absorbed one room after another until it occupied the greater part of the ground floor. Its chief room was large, and the walls of it were covered with books almost to the ceiling; the rooms into which it overflowed were of various sizes and shapes, and communicated in modes as various—by doors, by open arches, by short passages, by steps up and steps down.

Or again, later:

I saw no raven, but the librarian—the same slender elderly man, in a rusty black coat, large in the body and long in the tails. I had seen only his back before; now for the first time I saw his face. It was so thin that it showed the shape of the bones under it, suggesting the skulls his last-claimed profession must have made him familiar with. But in truth I had never before seen a face so alive, or a look so keen or so friendly as that in his pale blue eyes, which yet had a haze about them as if they had done much weeping.
     "You knew I was not a raven!" he said with a smile.
     "I knew you were Mr. Raven," I replied; "but somehow I thought you a bird too!"
     "What made you think me a bird?"
     "You looked a raven, and I saw you dig worms out of the earth with your beak."
     "And then?"
     "Toss them in the air."
     "And then?"
     "They grew butterflies, and flew away."
     "Did you ever see a raven do that? I told you I was a sexton!"
     "Does a sexton toss worms in the air, and turn them into butterflies?"
     "Yes."
     "I never saw one do it!"
     "You saw me do it!—But I am still librarian in your house, for I never was dismissed, and never gave up the office. Now I am librarian here as well."
     "But you have just told me you were sexton here!"
     "So I am. It is much the same profession. Except you are a true sexton, books are but dead bodies to you, and a library nothing but a catacomb!"

Someone (Lewis, I suppose) says somewhere that MacDonald once worked in the library of a certain estate, and that this experience doubtless colored his stories. Certainly I can understand its making a strong impression on him. There's something almost numinous about a large, empty library. To me it's akin to the fear described by Pascal in the quote on my sidebar, though why this is I'm not certain. Perhaps it's because libraries approach the mysteries of blank infinity with their iterative Chinese-box structure and seemingly interminable strings of characters.

Borges gives greatest expression to this spectral fear in his short story "The Library of Babel." Whatever he may have meant by the fable—I tread diffidently here—it captures the unsettling, nightmarish quality of rows upon rows upon rows of books.

The universe (which others call the Library) is composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings. From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable.

Each book in the Library consists of 410 pages with 40 lines on each page and 80 characters on each line; there are 25 characters in all, including 22 letters, the period, the comma, and the space. It is claimed that the Library contains every possible combination of letters without repetition. There are thus only finitely many rooms. However, adapting a line from Pascal, the narrator states:

The Library is a sphere whose exact center is any one of the hexagons and whose circumference is inaccessible.

This would seem to indicate a peculiar topology. The narrator expresses the opinion that the Library simply repeats. (This, however, is impossible, unless one of the rooms is different from the others. For each cell contains 20 shelves with 35 books per shelf, so that there are 2² × 5² × 7 books per cell, whereas the total number of possible combinations is 5^2,624,000, into which 2² × 5² × 7 is not divisible. Perhaps the spine characters introduce the necessary factors?) If the Library does repeat in a consistent way, then a horizontal slice would be an orientable surface, possibly of extremely high genus.

The weight and pregnant hush of libraries is handled more affectively in Wolfe's Shadow of the Torturer, when Severian descends to the stacks to find Master Ultan, the blind curator.

"We have books here bound in the hides of echidnes, krakens, and beasts so long extinct that those whose studies they are, are for the most part of the opinion that no brace of them survives unfossilized. We have books bound wholly in metals of unknown alloy, and books whose bindings are covered with thickset gems. We have books cased in perfumed woods shipped across the inconceivable gulf between creations—books doubly precious because no one on Urth can read them.
     "We have books whose papers are matted of plants from which spring curious alkaloids, so that the reader, in turning their pages, is taken unaware by bizarre fantasies and chimeric dreams. Books whose pages are not paper at all, but delicate wafers of white jade, ivory, and shell; books too whose leaves are the desiccated leaves of unknown plants. Books we have also that are not books at all to the eye: scrolls and tablets and recordings on a hundred different substances. There is a cube of crystal here—though I can no longer tell you where—no larger than the ball of your thumb that contains more books than the library itself does."

Here the library is invested with the impossible weight of ages that lie heaped upon Urth in those latter days, as the sun cools and dims.

I still have somewhat to say concerning libraries—chiefly of an autobiographical nature—but this is getting to be a long post, so I'll save it for the next. Why am I writing about all this, you ask, dear reader? Because it helps me organize my thoughts, and because the subject interests me. So, onward ho.

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.