April is the Cruelest Month

Unreal City
Under the brown fog of a winter noon

– T. S. Eliot, "The Waste Land"

The more I read genre fiction, the more I realize that I'm not so much drawn in by any genre per se as by certain styles and artistic visions. One writer will click while another leaves me frustrated with myself for not enjoying what so many others esteem so highly.

One thing I find myself drawn to is the attempt on an author's part to make their invented world out of whole cloth. I don't mean that I like vivid descriptions and attention to detail, though these are fine when called for. What I mean is, I don't much like works that rely heavily on genre conventions, that bank on the reader's familiarity with common settings and tropes rather than building up an independent vision. My eyes just glide right over stuff like that. It's not that conventions are bad. All writing has abbreviations and shortcuts. But not much of truth or beauty, of strangeness or wonder or epiphany, is going to be found in an insubstantial tissue of borrowed elements.

I was recently introduced to the works of M. John Harrison through Fletcher Vredenburg's Black Gate reviews of the Viriconium books. What he had to say made me eager to read them, and an insightful older post by Matthew David Surridge at the same site piqued my curiosity even more. Thus far I've completed The Pastel City (1971) and A Storm of Wings (1980).

Here are stories that make their world out of whole cloth.

They're dying earth tales, it is true, and as such have something of a heroic fantasy or sword-and-sorcery "feel" while remaining what many people would call science fiction. That's what I like about the genre; that, and its peculiar blend of hopelessness, ennui, and hilarity, which the Viriconium books certainly embody. They paint their own picture, however, and it's a picture that's vivid to the point of painfulness but almost aggressively lacking in nuts-and-bolts world-building. About which more in a moment.

China Miéville has called it an injustice that Harrison hasn't received a Nobel Prize. I'm not competent to comment on that, as I rarely read the work of Nobel laureates. I do have to admit that I enjoyed the earlier and less ambitious Pastel City more than A Storm of Wings. I suppose I just gravitate toward the concrete, and A Storm of Wings is rather nebulous, with a weirdly drifting narrative and long passages describing the characters' perceptions and motivations.* I don't object to a book's being elliptical, mind you, and The Pastel City is certainly that. But it also kept me turning the pages to see what the resolution was going to be, and it's hard to think of a fantasy novel that's had that effect on me recently.

I think Mr. Vredenburgh puts the differences between the novels very well:

Despite sharing a similar structure with its predecessor, A Storm of Wings, is a more potent book, filled with headier feats of prose and narrative gameplaying. While The Pastel City remains an excellent heroic fantasy tale, I'm now able to perceive it best as the template for Harrison to build on and spin off from mad, wild, meta-fictional constructs. In an interview, Harrison said: "A good ground rule for writing in any genre is: start with a form, then undermine its confidence in itself," he says. "Ask what it's afraid of, what it's trying to hide – then write that." Too much heroic fantasy relies on a lazy adherence to simple tropes – the hero, the obvious enemy, etc. In this book, he is clearly taking it to task for that, and while you may agree with that, or not, it's hard not to hear and engage with his argument.

Both books are rather beautiful and rather melancholy. They revolve around ineffective protagonists who don't rightly know what they're doing or why. The tone isn't jocular like the Cugel stories, but there's some humor to go with the sadness and horror of slow decay. The style is broad, full-bodied, and poetic, with a painter's sensitivity to color. There are echoes of Jack Vance and The Dying Earth, but I think the books owe the greater debt to "The Waste Land," itself formed (like the world of Viriconium) of the incomprehensible detritus of ruined civilizations.**

THE river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.

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In his first review, Mr. Vredenburgh links to two thought-provoking essays by Harrison: "What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium" and this essay on world-building.*** The latter begins with the following assertion, with which I wholeheartedly concur:

Every moment of a science fiction story must represent the triumph of writing over worldbuilding.

Amen to that! Harrison goes on to say a number of other things with which I sharply disagree, however, including this rather dumb statement:

The whole idea of worldbuilding is a bad idea about the world as much as it is a bad idea about fiction. It's a secularised, narcissised version of the fundamentalist Christian view that the world's a watch & God's the watchmaker.

Why is that dumb? (1) It employs the pejorative BS blanket term "fundamentalist Christian" and (2) it calls the watchmaker analogy a "fundamentalist Christian" view when it's actually more of an already-secularized Deist view. I mean, the history of the analogy is complicated, but I would hardly call people like Rene Descartes and Isaac Newton "fundamentalist Christians." Still, Harrison might have a point about watchmaking and world-building. Unfortunately, he goes on to this even dumber statement:

Worldbuilding is the province of people who, like Tolkien, actually resist the idea it's a game, and have installed their "secondary creation" concept as an aggressive defense of that position.

Tolkien resisted the idea that it's a game? In "On Fairy-Stories" he practically defines secondary creation as a game. Actually – and I suspect that this is the sticking point – it's defined as something of a divine game. Tolkien viewed fantasy much as his contemporary, the Catholic theologian Romano Guardini, viewed the liturgy of the mass, that is, as play. The self-deprecating yet gentle and hopeful tone of his essay's companion myth, "Leaf by Niggle," makes it pretty clear how he regarded his own world-building and its cosmic (in-)significance. His philosophy of fantasy bears little resemblance to the flattened caricature subjected to Harrison's procrustean bed.

Of course, it's arguable that Tolkien's "game," being in earnest rather than metafictional, isn't the kind of game Harrison likes to play. Still, I don't see how anyone could see Tolkien the author as some sort of demiurgic control freak. Is Middle Earth really such a closed system? If that's so, where do elements like Tom Bombadil fit in? Not even the characters of The Lord of the Rings are certain.

I don't think Tom needs philosophizing about, and is not improved by it. But many have found him an odd or indeed discordant ingredient. In historical fact I put him in because I had already "invented" him independently (he first appeared in the Oxford Magazine) and wanted an "adventure" on the way. But I kept him in, and as he was, because he represents certain things otherwise left out. [Tolkien, in a draft of a letter that wasn't sent ("it seemed to be taking myself too importantly"), The Letters of J. R. R. Tolkien, pp. 187-196]

The same letter contains a number of other interesting admissions. E.g.,

The tale is after all in the ultimate analysis a tale, a piece of literature, intended to have literary effect, and not real history. Thus the device adopted, that of giving its setting an historical air or feeling, and (an illusion of ?) three dimensions, is successful, seems shown by the fact that several correspondents have treated it in the same way – according to their different points of interest or knowledge: i.e., as if it were a report of "real" times and places, which my ignorance or carelessness had misrepresented in places or failed to describe properly to others. Its economics, science, artefacts, religion, and philosophy are defective, or at least sketchy. [ibid.]

Is that very different from the things Harrison has said about his Viriconium books? Actually, Tolkien's impatience with certain kinds of fans is familiar to anyone who's read his correspondence. In Tolkien's view, there is a broad difference between secondary creation and the kind of commercial world-building represented by this handy-dandy SFWA tips sheet, two approaches that Harrison appears to conflate.

Curiously, however, I believe that the other essay, "What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium," gets it exactly right from beginning to end.

The commercial fantasy that has replaced [the great modern fantasies] is often based on a mistaken attempt to literalise someone else's metaphor, or realise someone else's rhetorical imagery. For instance, the moment you begin to ask (or rather to answer) questions like, "Yes, but what did Sauron look like?"; or, "Just how might an Orc regiment organise itself?"; the moment you concern yourself with the economic geography of pseudo-feudal societies, with the real way to use swords, with the politics of courts, you have diluted the poetic power of Tolkien's images. You have brought them under control. You have tamed, colonised and put your own cultural mark on them.  Literalisation is important to both writers and readers of commercial fantasy. The apparent depth of the great fantasy inscapes – their appearance of being a whole world – is exhilarating: but that very depth creates anxiety. The revisionist wants to learn to operate in the inscape: this relieves anxiety and reasserts a sense of control over "Tolkien's World."

With far greater concision and profundity than my skills allow, this says something I've been trying to get at since I started this blog, and perfectly expresses my attitude toward commercial fantasy. The provenance of the two essays isn't altogether clear to me, and I find it puzzling that Harrison, who wrote "What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium" first, later transferred his judgment of the sandbox-building revisionists and their readers to Tolkien himself.

But here let us take our leave of M. John Harrison for the time being. I shall continue to read his Viriconium stories because I think they're good and well worth the effort, and his provoking essays have provided some grist for the old blog-mill, for which I thank him.

# # #

* It has occurred to me that, whatever its artistic value, the use of postmodernist deconstruction in genre fiction is potentially a very clever commercial ploy. People nowadays have little patience for the less-than-consistent, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants serials of yesteryear. Well, if carefully cultivated, a postmodernist pose lets the genre writer get away with pretty much anything in the way of self-contradiction, and critics (genre critics) will laud his or her work to the skies and gush about how close it is to real literature. That reflects what I'm always saying, which is that fantasy, when it tries to stop being itself and hobnob with high society, just ends up appropriating a bunch of outdated fashions. There's something absurd about genre writing that festoons itself with the trappings of what the cool kids were doing decades ago and calls itself "literary." Not that I think The Pastel City or A Storm of Wings fall into that, exactly...

A little deconstruction is a fine thing in a genre story. It adds bite. But you see what I mean? It's as much a material element as any of the little tricks Lin Carter recommends in Imaginary Worlds. Readers tolerate it, or even enjoy it, so long as it's subordinated to the end of the story. Deconstruction as an end in itself is a pursuit for the literati. In genre fiction, it's just a narcissistic (!) betrayal of readers. It's also as pointless, derivative, and time-bound as Lin Carter's clumsiest pastiche.

** T. S. Eliot was famously inspired by Jessie Weston's From Ritual to Romance. His poems are referenced repeatedly by Apocalypse Now, and From Ritual to Romance – the very same edition I have on my bookshelf, as a matter of fact – is visible in Kurtz's dwelling at the end of the film. What I'm saying is, I could have worked all this into my last post, which also touched on The Valley of Gwangi, hollow earth theories, Pellucidar, Kong: Skull Island, "Heart of Darkness," colonialism, weird German conquistador movies, and various other things, but I didn't.

*** "What It Might Be Like to Live in Viriconium" was (so far as I can discover) written in 1996 and subsequently published in a fanzine. The other essay appears to have been copied from an archived version of a blog post. It's possible that they were both typed by dogs with keyboards. That's the Internet for you.

Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions

I CALL our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.

Having recently re-read Edwin A. Abbott's Flatland: A Romance of Many Dimensions (1884), a late Victorian novella which I assign as reading in the geometry course I teach every spring, I am struck with the fact that here is a bona fide fantasy that rarely makes the canons of fantasy fiction. British fantasists like H. Rider Haggard, William Morris, and George MacDonald are always named, though rarely (one suspects) read. Earlier satires like Gulliver's Travels and Utopia receive honorable mention. But Flatland, which is enjoyable as both a fantasy and a satire, is sadly excluded, and its author, a clergyman, unknown to fantasy-lovers.

It is easy to see why self-appointed historiographers like L. Sprague de Camp (Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers) and Lin Carter (Imaginary Worlds) left it by the wayside, if they were aware of it at all, and why the latter excluded it even from very eclectic collections like Golden Cities Far and Dragons, Elves, and Heroes. A novel that takes place in a two-dimensional universe wouldn't have been in their line, fixated on material elements as they were, despite the large role world-building plays in the work. There really is nothing quite like Flatland.

The narrator, A. Square, begins by helping the reader imagine what life in Flatland is like.

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface, but without the power of rising above or sinking below it, very much like shadows – only hard and with luminous edges – and you will then have a pretty correct notion of my country and countrymen.

A busy thoroughfare in Flatland

Alas, a few years ago, I should have said "my universe": but now my mind has been opened to higher views of things.

With perceptions limited entirely to the plane, the world appears to its denizens as a line, much as our three-dimensional world is perceived by us through a two-dimensional field of vision (as in a television screen, which is flat).

As there is neither sun with us, nor any light of such a kind as to make shadows, we have none of the helps to the sight that you have in Spaceland. If our friend comes closer to us we see his line becomes larger; if he leaves us it becomes smaller: but still he looks like a straight line; be he a Triangle, Square, Pentagon, Hexagon, Circle, what you will – a straight Line he looks and nothing else.

This exposition of Flatland society and history continues through half the book, touching on the stratification of social classes according to number of sides, the operation of schools and prisons, domestic arrangements, relations between the sexes, the rise of Chromatistes and the art of painting, the Universal Colour Bill, the machinations of the Chief Circle Pantocyclus, the violent suppression of the chromatic sedition, and so forth.

Before the Sanitary and Social Board.

The satire of late Victorian society is heavy but not (to me, at least) altogether transparent. For instance, women in Flatland are both despised and feared – despised, for they are regarded as irrational and foolishly sentimental, and feared, for their bodies are extremely sharp line segments, and they are capable of unthinkingly slaughtering their own families if provoked. A. Square belabors the point in several passages, but it seems plain from the forward that this is to be taken ironically. What precisely Abbott was driving at escapes me, unless it was to ridicule Victorian mores by showing a society in which the strait confinement of women really was a cogent necessity, though even this is questioned within the narrative itself.

A well-bred Hexagon yielding to a Lady.

The second half of the book presents a sequence of visions and visitations. In the first, A. Square descends upon Lineland in a dream, coming to revile its King for his narrow-minded inability to conceive of more than one dimension

"Besotted Being! You think yourself the perfection of existence, while you are in reality the most imperfect and imbecile. You profess to see, whereas you can see nothing but a Point! You plume yourself on inferring the existence of a Straight Line; but I can see Straight Lines, and infer the existence of Angles, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and even Circles. Why waste more words? Suffice it that I am the completion of your incomplete self. You are a Line, but I am a Line of Lines, called in my country a Square: and even I, infinitely superior though I am to you, am of little account among the great nobles of Flatland, whence I have come to visit you, in the hope of enlightening your ignorance."

Hearing these words the King advanced towards me with a menacing cry as if to pierce me through the diagonal; and in that same moment there arose from myriads of his subjects a multitudinous war-cry, increasing in vehemence till at last methought it rivaled the roar of an army of a hundred thousand Isosceles, and the artillery of a thousand Pentagons. Spell-bound and motionless, I could neither speak nor move to avert the impending destruction; and still the noise grew louder, and the King came closer, when I awoke to find the breakfast-bell recalling me to the realities of Flatland.

Our narrator is then visited in his turn by a Sphere from Spaceland, who appears to him as a circle (or priest) who can change sizes at will, and before whom A. Square is no better off than the denizens of Lineland were before him. When arguments fail, the visitant resorts to deeds:

"The higher I mount, and the further I go from your Plane, the more I can see, though of course I see it on a smaller scale. For example, I am ascending; now I can see your neighbour the Hexagon and his family in their several apartments; now I see the inside of the Theatre, ten doors off, from which the audience is only just departing; and on the other side a Circle in his study, sitting at his books. Now I shall come back to you. And, as a crowning proof, what do you say to my giving you a touch, just the least touch, in your stomach? It will not seriously injure you, and the slight pain you may suffer cannot be compared with the mental benefit you will receive."

 

Before I could utter a word of remonstrance, I felt a shooting pain in my inside, and a demoniacal laugh seemed to issue from within me. A moment afterwards the sharp agony had ceased, leaving nothing but a dull ache behind, and the Stranger began to reappear, saying, as he gradually increased in size, "There, I have not hurt you much, have I? If you are not convinced now, I don't know what will convince you. What say you?"

Though at first bewildered by his subsequent elevation above Flatland, which permits him to see "through" walls, A. Square is eventually led to posit the existence of more than three spacial dimensions.

[T]ake me to that blessed Region where I in Thought shall see the insides of all solid things. There, before my ravished eye, a Cube, moving in some altogether new direction, but strictly according to Analogy, so as to make every particle of his interior pass through a new kind of Space, with a wake of its own – shall create a still more perfect perfection than himself, with sixteen terminal Extrasolid angles, and Eight solid Cubes for his Perimeter. And once there, shall we stay our upward course? In that blessed region of Four Dimensions, shall we linger on the threshold of the Fifth, and not enter therein? Ah, no! Let us rather resolve that our ambition shall soar with our corporal ascent. Then, yielding to our intellectual onset, the gates of the Sixth Dimension shall fly open; after that a Seventh, and then an Eighth –

The Sphere, overcome with ire at this impertinence, returns A. Square to Flatland. There the narrator inevitably shares the fate of all enthusiastic visionaries out of step with their ruling classes when he tries to spread the "Gospel of Three Dimensions."

The "still more perfect perfection" of the cube referred to above is the regular polytope now known as a hypercube or tesseract. The latter term was coined by Charles Howard Hinton in 1888. Incidentally, this figure (or, rather, its five-dimensional analogue) plays a large role in A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle, in which the dimensional analogy is pursued considerably less competently; that novel also glances upon a two-dimensional world, and would seem to be partly inspired by Flatland. However, in treating time as a fourth "spacial" dimension, it adopts the erroneous conception of space-time expounded upon by H. G. Wells in The Time Machine (1895).

Two recalcitrant revolutionaries executed after trial.

Abbott's lucid approach to the fourth dimension by way of analogy is almost astonishing, considering that it comes from a clergyman (presumably) untutored in such matters, and well before the theories of Ludwig Schläfli were well known. Schläfli, a Swiss mathematician, originated the idea of regular polytopes in the 1850s, but his work did not receive recognition until much later. In Regular Polytopes (1947), H. S. M. Coxeter notes that regular polytopes were independently rediscovered by nine different mathematicians between the years 1881 and 1900, even as Flatland was being written. The time, evidently, was ripe.

Though relatively obscure at its publication, Flatland went on to receive widespread acclaim among mathematicians and physicists in the twentieth century. In our own time, theoretical physics has for a number of years been feeling its way toward the possibility that more than three spacial dimensions play a role in the structure of the universe. My doctoral work focused on higher-dimensional geometry and applications to particle physics, so this is something I know a bit about.

But the book as a whole is quite enjoyable purely as a work of speculative fiction. At every point it compels the reader to ponder what life would be like in a two-dimensional world.

There being no sun nor other heavenly bodies, it is impossible for us to determine the North in the usual way; but we have a method of our own. By a Law of Nature with us, there is a constant attraction to the South; and, although in temperate climates this is very slight – so that even a Woman in reasonable health can journey several furlongs northward without much difficulty – yet the hampering effect of the southward attraction is quite sufficient to serve as a compass in most parts of our earth. Moreover, the rain (which falls at stated intervals) coming always from the North, is an additional assistance; and in the towns we have the guidance of the houses, which of course have their side-walls running for the most part North and South, so that the roofs may keep off the rain from the North. In the country, where there are no houses, the trunks of the trees serve as some sort of guide.

Stephen Hawking suggests in The Universe in a Nutshell that such a creature would be unable to digest food, since a "tube" through the body would separate the unfortunate polygon into two halves. But, perhaps, like flatworms, the Flatlanders expel waste material through the mouth, which, Abbott tells us, also serves as the eye, indicating a physiology markedly different from our three-dimensional preconceptions.


Two small country houses with an antiquated square outbuilding.

Other questions arise. Writing is mentioned, for instance. Flatland writing must needs be one-dimensional, however; of what does this writing consist? Something like printed Morse code, perhaps? What are books like? Does Flatland geometry predominantly consist of the study of magnitudes on a line, much as ours consists of shapes in a plane? What would they think of the Cantor set, I wonder?

 

Whatever could the hills and mines mentioned by the narrator be like? And what of trees, which are referred to as growing from south to north? And so on.

Alas, the book is much too short to begin answering such questions. Not that most other readers would be as interested in them as I am. I happen to know the ins and outs of classical Euclidean geometry and its modern extensions and generalizations pretty well, and I can imagine any number of brave new worlds for A. Square to explore. Others have tried their hands at sequels before now; perhaps I shall join their number some day.

Lately, though, I've been piecing together digital collages of Flatland life in spare moments here and there, ostensibly to put an illustrated version of Flatland on my faculty website for my students to peruse. (These are the color pictures on this post; the drawings are Abbott's.) I have to say, I rather like the results, not that that means much.

When I took art as a teenager, I quickly found myself at the front of the class; however, every year, my teacher would begin by tasking us with forming a composition out of geometrical shapes, and I inevitably received F's on these assignments without ever knowing why. It was quite maddening.

In recent years, I've spent a good bit of time pondering the relation between artistic and mathematical abstraction, as a perusal of my artsy posts will show. (See here and here, for instance.) These collages are, like my fractals, a step toward abstraction in art from the far side. In making them I'm reminded of my old composition assignments. What I'm trying to say is, I hope I wouldn't still get F's on them.

Rites of Spring

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

— "Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" 

Life on earth is divided into three main phases: the Paleozoic Era, the Mesozoic Era, and the Cenozoic Era. The Cenozoic is the most recent, and saw the dominance of mammals and the evolution of man. The Mesozoic is most famous for the dinosaurs.

Rudolph Zallinger's 1947 Age of Reptiles mural at Yale University. I had a copy of this
on my bedroom wall when I was a kid. The right-hand part inspires my writing.

But it's always been the Paleozoic Era to which I'm most drawn, partly, perhaps, because it's older and more mysterious, partly because it's much less popular. There is no Carboniferous Park cinematic franchise, no iconic image of Raquel Welch in a fur bikini with a lumbering moschops in the background.

I've also always been drawn to lower life-forms, like mosses and marine invertebrates, which dominated in the Paleozoic.


From Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur.

And then, too, there's the mysterious mass extinction event known as the Great Dying (perhaps not unconnected with the flying polyp wars), which took place at the close of the Permian Period, wiping out something like 96% of the world's species, beside which the demise of the dinosaurs much later in geological history pales in comparison. The world of the Paleozoic is almost like an alien planet, with giant sea scorpions, enormous dragonflies, terrifying armored fishes, forests of towering mosses, and huge carnivorous amphibians.


An artist's 1906 rendering of a coal swamp with
tree ferns, scale trees, and giant scouring rushes.

My love of things prehistoric and paleozoic is goes hand in hand with my love of their depiction during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, incorporating motifs from the Art Nouveau and Art Deco eras. It is easy to forget that science is all inference and paradigm, colored by the environment in which it flourishes. I grew up reading books from the public library, hence came to know the primeval world through the outdated paleontological renderings of that earlier epoch, redolent of quiet museums of natural history where upraised fossils were their own silent testimony. Each period has its own idea of the world, and the prehistory of the early twentieth century is, to me, haunting and dreary and brutish and lovely.

Image from Disney's Fantasia (1940).

The part of Disney's Fantasia set to my favorite piece of music, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, though quite different from the original ballet (and, somewhat apocryphally, derided by the composer), is a perfect evocation of my feelings for the era. It's like a Tiffany lampshade with primeval monsters engaged in a grim fight for survival.


Tiffany stained glass window (c. 1890).

H. P. Lovecraft had something of the same sentiment, I think, with all his strange elder races combining primitive plant and fungoid forms with echinoderms and arthropods. To make a full circle of some of the connections here, I note that Nicholas Roerich, who designed the costumes and set for the original 1913 production of The Rite of Spring, is referred to by Lovecraft in At the Mountains of Madness, and mentioned in the same sentence as that famously erudite gentleman, Mr. Alhazred:

Through the desolate summits swept ranging, intermittent gusts of the terrible antarctic wind; whose cadences sometimes held vague suggestions of a wild and half-sentient musical piping, with notes extending over a wide range, and which for some subconscious mnemonic reason seemed to me disquieting and even dimly terrible. Something about the scene reminded me of the strange and disturbing Asian paintings of Nicholas Roerich, and of the still stranger and more disturbing descriptions of the evilly fabled plateau of Leng which occur in the dreaded Necronomicon of the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred.

Do you see what we've done? We've made a complete circle: Paleozoic → Chthulu mythos → Nicholas Roerich → The Rite of Spring → Fantasia → Paleozoic.

A member of the Great Race of Yith [source]
featured in "The Shadow out of Time."

This is how my mind works. I find loops of connections, draw my own morals from them, and make them into stories. Whether the results are intelligible is another matter. My current literary endeavor, The King of Nightspore's Crown, has a long segment inspired by both the animated film and the ballet. (The latter, a sequence of quasi-pagan rituals choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, was so avant-garde that it sparked a riot at its premier. Watch a reconstruction, sans riot, here.)


One of Roerich's backdrop designs for The Rite of Spring.

There's a lot to think about in setting a story against a Paleozoic backdrop. For one thing, there is no grass, hence no fields, meadows, prairies, or steppes. As a matter of fact, there's practically no terrestrial life beyond the limit of the coal swamps. There are no birds singing in the background. Flowers, fruits, bees, and butterflies are absent. So are milk and bread and wine and honey, and wool and cotton and linen and down.

This makes metaphors rather difficult. Can one say that the wall of an ancient crypt is "honeycombed" with tombs, or that an old man is "waspish"? Are airships flown by "aviators"? Are the embarrassed allowed to be "sheepish"? Can the recalcitrant be "cowed" into submission? Is there a "bloom" on a young girl's cheek? Can an oaf make "asinine" comments? Can dawn-tinted clouds wear a "rosy" hue? Do cozening enchanters speak "mellifluously"? Do mighty warriors flex their "muscles"?

Indeed, how far does one go in "winnowing" out words with connotations that violate the rules of the world? As a person who consults an etymological dictionary on a regular basis, I could go crazy fretting about things like this. In the end, I suppose it's all a matter of ear. Whatever you do, the important thing is to not call attention to it. Still, it's worth noting that the great fantasists generally are very careful about word choice.

J. G. Ballard's strange and lovely Drowned World, which I just finished reading, is another literary work featuring the Paleozoic. Though framed as a post-apocalyptic tale, it centers around man's evolutionary regress to a still-present genetic past.

In The Sea Around Us, marine biologist Rachel Carson claims (with what truth I know not) that the chemical composition of human blood represents the salinity of the primordial seas from which our amphibious forebears arose. And zoologist Adolf Portmann discusses in Animal Forms and Patterns how widely differing species share similar embryos, so that the first stages in the development of a man are almost indistinguishable from lower vertebrates and even arthropods. We are still as segmented as millipedes in our backbones.

Trilobites, eurypterids, and horseshoe crabs,
from Haeckel's Kunstformen der Natur.

So perhaps it would be no difficult matter to slip backwards, or even to step sideways to another branch of the evolutionary tree, an idea I sometimes explore in my stories.

                                                                       for
yourself, sir, should be old as I am, if like a crab
you could go backward. 

— Hamlet

Terra Incognita

Here is a map of the northeastern arc of Enoch, the world-city, the coast-long downtown that surrounds the sea on three sides like a giant omega, together with various adjacent lands.

It's a crude black-and-white scan of my ink drawing on paper, and probably needs to be rescanned and touched up. But you get the gist of it. The lettering is in an Art Nouveau font. I'm inordinately pleased with the mountains, which go beyond the cut-and-paste angle-things you see on many fantasy maps. The basic style is influenced by Tolkien's maps in The Hobbit.

Strangely enough, I've been drawing fantasy maps for longer than I've been reading fantasy. Here is the story of my first fantasy map.

It all began in the third grade. My teacher was kind of weird. For instance, she believed she had once seen a flying saucer, when she was a little girl: it had descended over her backyard one night, and she'd thought to it, if you can hear my thoughts, give me some sign, whereupon it had started flashing and flown away. I believed the story, and after that would "think" to all the mysterious lights I saw moving in the sky; once, a light I thought to kind of blinked, or so I imagined, and when I mentioned it to my teacher a few weeks later, she was upset that I hadn't told her sooner. She acted as though I had neglected to give her a crucial piece of information. "Why didn't you tell me sooner?" were her words. We also had to talk to her houseplants when we watered them, to encourage them to grow, and other New Agey stuff like that.

Well, anyway, sometimes this teacher would turn the lights out, sit cross-legged on her desk, and rub a crystal bowl with a crystal rod, producing a hypnotic hum. We would put our heads on our desks and imagine whatever she narrated. Generally it would begin like this: "You come to a gate. It has your name on it. You open it and go inside. There you find a giant egg. The egg is your house."

Not long after this I was introduced to Edith Hamilton's Mythology by my father, and I had been pretty skilled with a map and compass for some time, so I began creating fantasy contour maps of the egg-house-country peopled by creatures of Greek mythology. As a matter of fact, I got in trouble in math class when the girl who sat in front of me to told the teacher that I was drawing and not paying attention.

So when I discovered Tolkien at age fourteen or thereabouts I was immediately drawn to the maps. What sets them apart from a lot of other fantasy maps is, I think, the fact that they were constructed as part of the drama. They're not "overworld" maps someone drew and set a story in. Tolkien was continually modifying the geography so as to accommodate his desired plot. They're almost alive. Of course the geography is quite unrealistic, as he himself admitted: long, straight mountain ranges running north-south or east-west, at right angles to each other. But they're really a literary construction, and the power of the story makes such artificiality a nonissue.

I was also really into fantasy role-playing video games at the time, especially Final Fantasy II and III (IV and VI in Japan), those have doubtless influenced me as well.

In college I dealt with a bout of depression by creating a future history of Martian civilization, drawing numerous maps based on a fold-out map of the planet's surface I'd gotten in a National Geographic. None of those have survived, unfortunately. I also began, but never finished, a large watercolor map of the world of Norse mythology. That I still have somewhere.

So, me and fantasy maps, we go way back.

This map may ultimately be accompanied by another with a smaller inch-to-mile ratio, so that the entire Tethys Sea is visible. This is for a sword-and-planet story, so the design takes place on a planetary scale, though much of the surface is terra incognita to the inhabitants. A really good map makes the reader want to know what lies beyond the boundaries, and I hope mine has that effect.

All of this brings up a stylistic issue. Do you make your map bear some of the weight of your story, so that the reader has to consult it if they want to follow the action, or do you write your story in such a way that the reader must consult the map only if they can't keep the geography in their head? I go with the second, regarding the first as sloppy writing. Then again, I can't remember ever having read The Lord of the Rings without looking at the map.

Now on to the next thing.

Night Thoughts

A few random updates.

I've written a longish short story, an homage to some of my favorite pieces from the wild and free pre-Tolkien epoch, with flavors of H. Rider Haggard, H. G. Wells, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert E. Howard, Mervyn Peake, and others. Right now it's simmering on the back burner. Maybe I'll submit it, maybe not. I hold half my stuff back. They say you're not supposed to do this, but all the stuff I've actually published contains material incorporated from stories I've deemed unsuccessful for one reason or another, so I don't feel that I'm wasting my time.

My evenings have been taken up with painting. I'm still working on my groovy Ballantine-style mass-market fantasy book cover. I've gotten into the painting stage at last. I think it's going pretty well so far, but I never can tell if the parts will coalesce in the end. As I paint, I'm listening to the audiobook of The Door to Saturn, Book 2 of a Clark Ashton Smith collection put out by Night Shade Books. The stories vary from middling to excellent, but the readings are all quite good. Smith's stories are often mordantly humorous, and the best way to achieve the proper effect when reading aloud is to adopt a rather dry, reserved manner, as most of the readers, happily, have done.

Next I'd like to do a couple of maps. I'll need one large-scale "overworld" map and one local city map, perhaps with a cut-away view to show the layered structure. Seems to me there are two kinds of maps in fantasy: those that are shaped by the story (and therefore subservient to it), and those that shape the story. The latter tend to generate bad coupon-quest stories, but not always: Orson Scott Card's Hart's Hope, which I'm fond of, apparently began as a city map.

Me, I've been drawing fantasy maps since before I started reading fantasy. My third grade teacher was into various New Age ideas. She told us stories about having personally seen flying saucers and communicated with them with her mind; she made us talk to the plants when we were on watering duty, to encourage them to grow; and, most significantly, she conducted meditation sessions in which she would sit cross-legged on her desk, rub a crystal bowl with a crystal rod, and narrate a sequence of events beginning with a giant egg that was also a house and had our name on it. The egg-country took on a life of its own in my mind, and it wasn't long before I was peopling the land and drawing maps of it. These were always contour maps, and used standard map symbols, with a legend and a compass rose, as my dad had recently taught me map-reading and orientation.

So it should go without saying that the maps in Tolkien's books were a big draw when I encountered them in high school. The map in The Lord of the Rings is definitely the first kind of map, the kind shaped by the story, a literary artifact, as is apparent from his correspondence. What gets you when you read LOTR is all the walking. The story takes place in plains, mountains, forests, deserts, swamps; there is only one city to speak of, and it's a compact walled fortress. The sense of space is what really made the book appeal to me. My own fantasy is rather more urban, though it certainly isn't "urban fantasy." Most of it takes place along the weedy margins of a great city. Actually, my city is little more than margin, being long and thin and all-encompassing, like Dido's stretched hide.

Much of it is inspired by my own experiences in San Antonio, where I grew up. In its slow growth, the city has reached arms around tracts of countryside and then enclosed them on the far side, so that now you have these hidden pockets of farmland or brush country surrounded on all sides by urban development. Some of these pockets are quite old. On the South Side there's an old Spanish acequia and aqueduct that still function to irrigate crops. The inner city is a strange otherworld, larger on the inside than its perimeter would seem to allow, with very old things here and there, like fossils in a prehistoric fluvial deposit. My most recent story, "Day of the Dragonfly," was prompted by a quest into its depths to find an actual fossil, an ammonite, for my little boy, who requested one for his birthday.

I worked on a land surveying crew in high school. We had to crawl or hack our way through all the forgotten nooks and crannies of the city, through the back rooms of warehouses that stank of urine, under bridges and around stagnant pools lined with rank weeds, across back lots overgrown with mesquite where people had left old cars to rust decades ago, into the foyer of Planet Hollywood on the Riverwalk. Sometimes we saw beautiful things, like a family of roosting barn owls in a short brick structure with a twisted metal roof. At other times we saw ugly things, which I'll not describe here. Once I was bitten by a dog as we crossed a series of unfenced lots, and had to be taken to a hospital, where I shared a room with a young man who'd just been savagely beaten with a baseball bat because of road rage. It was summer, with temperatures in the triple digits, and clouds of mosquitoes in the heavy humid air.

The men I worked with had a certain Dickensian eccentricity. There was one guy who would sidle up to the rear-view mirror to pop his pimples, who liked to take us to the Taco Bell where his wife's former lover worked, to gloat. There was another guy so skinny and stringy he looked like he'd been microwaved too long; he lived on peanuts and coffee, until one day he turned purple and fell over in a juniper thicket, the victim of heat stroke and exhaustion. Then there was the guy with the braid, biker mustache, and bandana, who lived with his mother, and liked to get me alone to tell me cautionary tales about his former crack habit. Another guy, a Louisiana Cajun, had a vendetta against prickly pear, which he believed sucked the moisture from the land, killing the "good" plants; every time he saw one (which was quite often) he hacked it to pieces with his machete, not reflecting, I suppose, that this is one of the ways such cacti propagate.

None of them wore seatbelts, but they would loop the belts over their shoulders so as not to get pulled over. They honked the horn and shouted lewd things at every pretty woman they saw. They lied to their superiors daily, about the pettiest of things. Once they chewed me out for emptying the trash bucket in the company dumpster, because they knew the foil wrappers would give them away – they'd been getting breakfast tacos while on the clock, which wasn't allowed.

All in all, it was dirty, oppressive work. I lived from one little touch of beauty to the next. One morning as I left the house for work I looked up in the eastern sky and saw Venus centered just above the upturned horns of a thin crescent moon. That one vision bore me through weeks of work.

Like Tolkien, I find myself deeply troubled by modern urbanization and the general speeding-up of life. But unlike him I feel that I've had to make my peace with it. I'm not an Oxford don, but an anonymous guy of very mixed ancestry stuck – permanently, it seems – in the South Texas brush country. I write to cope with it.

On a related note, one reason for my low output on this blog lately has been a serious mental disturbance. It may seem ridiculous, but this stemmed from the renovation of the house next door. You see, I live next to this big, fine house built by a great public figure of yore for his mother. Harry S Truman actually spent the night there once, supposedly. I've seen the room he stayed in. Also, as everyone within a thirty-mile radius knows, the bathroom is marble and has gold faucets, and the master bedroom is big enough to play arena football in. Our own humble domicile used to belong to the family as well, and once housed the foreman of their massive ranch.

Anyway, the house is kind of a status item, and was recently bought up by an old branch of the local gentry. (We have gentry here.) They proceeded to cut down every one of their pecan trees, trees that provided my property with as much shade as theirs. The yard is a now a gravel pit surrounded by a temporary chain-link fence. Half the bricks and siding have been cut off the building. A sheet-metal portable lies alongside my driveway. There's a constant sawing and dumping and shouting and jackhammering. It's been going on for over a month. And I haven't even ever seen the owners! They've never deigned to stop by to say, hey, we're super-rich and are going to be causing some serious disturbance in your lives for the next half-year or so. This is Texas, the Friendship State, and we just don't do things like that here. But as I said, this is the local gentry, and around here I'm regarded as singled out for a special blessing on account of my new neighbors' mere presence.

It's the trees that really get me, though. They were big, old trees, and they just hacked 'em down. Some were kind of in bad shape from the drought, granted, but certainly not all. The tree trimmer himself felt so bad for us he brought us a pizza one day (hey, we take what we can get), and, on his own time and without my asking him, took up a big brush pile I'd had in the backyard, which would have taken me days to break up and haul on my own. Now that's Texas decency. Anyway, without the trees I feel like Sam in the scouring of the Shire, but I have no mallorns to plant. I've gotten more used to it now, but for a while I felt like I was just drifting through space.

Now I'm tempted to plant a line of hackberries down the property line, and maybe build a big ugly chicken coop for my chickens up against the fence.

Tricks of the Trade

And now at long last let us complete our dialogue with the last three chapters of Lin Carter's Imaginary Worlds. Previous posts are here and here. The eleventh and final chapter is entitled "Tricks of the Trade: Some Advanced Techniques of World-Making." Let's begin!

The chapter is divided into four sections, the first being about magic. Lin here gives the oft-repeated advice that magic without limitations gets a bit dull. I've written about this before. Different people find different things dull, I suppose, but what I find dull is stories with magic "systems." To me the issue is one of style, and is best attended to by careful word choice and presentation rather than the invention of ingenious "rules."

He cites several examples. The most illustrative is Jack Vance's Dying Earth, in which a magician can seemingly hold only so many spells in his skull at one time. To me, the stories in The Dying Earth are enjoyable chiefly for their mordant humor, and the magic system contributes to this by putting the protagonists in potentially embarrassing situations.

Another example is Tolkien.

Similarly, in The Lord of the Rings, Professor Tolkien* faced the problem of Sauron, a black magician of such immense power that he long ago transcended mortality to become virtually indestructible: he is described as almost a god of evil. Now, any hero, no matter how gallant, is obviously going to be helpless against an antagonist of such strength. Tolkien anticipates the objection by having the greater part of Sauron's power center about his possession of an enormously potent talisman, the "One Ring"; his entire plot revolves around the dual problem of keeping Sauron from obtaining the ring and, if possible, destroying it before he does gain possession of it.

Sigh. Where to begin? Didn't Lin write Tolkien: A Look Behind The Lord of the Rings? Did he not even read the book? Yes, he boasts on page 115 that he read it three times. Three times! And that's enough to write a book about it? No, apparently not. At any rate, his description might apply to a Ringwraith, but certainly not to Sauron, who, it is quite clear from the book, never was a mortal. He is, in fact, quite literally a "god of evil," if we are to take the Valar and Maiar as gods, as man in his darkened wisdom often does. If anything, Sauron has fallen by becoming dependent on physical forms; the legends from the end of the Second Age show him to be discomfited by the destruction of his corporeal "vehicle." You don't have to have read The Silmarilion to know all this; you don't even have to have read the Appendix, which Lin certainly could have done. It's alluded to a number of times in the text.

The point about the limitations imposed on Sauron by the One Ring is well-taken, but this is more like the checks and balances one finds in fairy tales than the hocus-pocus rules of Jack Vance. I notice that no limitations are made explicit concerning Gandalf's magic tricks, which seem to consist of lighting things on fire, making his staff glow, and (occasionally) casting bolts of lightning. No, Gandalf is more like Geoffrey of Monmouth's Merlin, who's nine parts prophet and one part thaumaturge, and simply goes places to make things happen. But Tolkien wisely makes his stories about hobbits rather than wizards.

The second part Lin calls "The Problem of Realism." He dwells on realism of presentation as opposed to realism of content. Sharply rendered, crisp little details draw the reader into a fantastic story. C. S. Lewis'** Experiment in Criticism is cited to good effect, and one of Lewis' examples is the dragon that sniffs along the stone in Beowulf. Lin adds several of his own, but his, alas!, are all of the sugar-icing variety he so delighted in, like the mounted unicorn head in the study of Malygris the Magician, or the gate made from a single piece of ivory in "Idle Days on the Yann." They're quite the opposite of what Lewis means. He lists commonplace details used to make the fantastic "real," while Lin lists fantastic details used to make the commonplace fantastic.

The third part, "The Problem of 'Business,'" continues this theme, by dwelling on the little fripperies that abound in Eddison and The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath and the like. Best if used sparingly, and with reason!

The fourth section is about flora and fauna, and treats of the critters one finds in fantasies. For one thing, should stories set in other worlds or olden tymes feature horses as mounts, or some other creature? What I say is, if the mood of the story calls for horses, horses let them be; otherwise, give me emus or biarmosuchians or thoats. Just be consistent, and don't make things up as mere stand-ins for commonplace creatures. Burroughs is cited, and certainly the thoats, banths, and zitidars of Barsoom are quite effective. For the record, the horses in Eddison's Mercury have never offended me.

I'm sure other people have complained about this, but the horses in a lot of fantasies are rather lacking. Writers seem to take them for a species of hooved moped. Now, I know a bit about horses and their handling, having ridden them in my youth – this is Texas, after all – and I hate them with a passion. Yes, I hate horses, and I look a little suspiciously on horse people, who when I meet them on the trail seem to regard themselves as a higher grade of being, looking down on me from their restive, smelly mounts, ordering me to scuttle this way or that, wearing their little white helmets like crowns.


A horse nearly bringeth Sir Percival to destruction.
Note the knowing eye, the demented grin.

I once went on a week-long cavalcade (I'm on a tangent, I know) through the Davis Mountains of west Texas, led by two lazy, supercilious, self-regarding "cowboys" from Pecos. (Needless to say, no cows were in evidence.) My horse was named Crazy Alice, and she more than earned her modifier. She hated mules – not donkeys, not horses, just mules – and would lay her ears back and charge if one came near her. I had to show myself her master there, but if a mule was in front of us in line she had a way of secretly nipping its buttocks with her teeth. She would also never take a step when a flying leap would do, and once fell over on my leg, the stiff stirrup fortunately protecting my bones as she tried to scramble to her feet again. (I kept my seat like a pro, though, and everyone else told me I looked like a rodeo rider, something I was not a little proud of.)

So, you see? I read horsey fantasies, with horses that move as though on little wheels, and never take craps or kick their riders in the knee or need their girths tightened or try to roll around while they're crossing a dry riverbed, and my eyes just kind of glaze over. Then again, horses are probably more exotic to a lot of people these days than thoats. I guess that's why we've got urban fantasy now.

Well, this concludes my discussion of Lin Carter. If I seem a little hard on him, don't think it's because I'm not fond of him; I am. As I've said many times, I certainly owe him a great deal, for having given me something to sink my teeth into when I discovered that Terry Brooks and Katharine Kerr weren't going to satisfy the craving awakened by Tolkien and Lewis. He loved what I loved, as few people do. Requiescat in pace.

* I've resolved that, once I'm a famous novelist, I'm going to be known as Professor Ordoñez, because I am, after all, a math professor. This may be difficult, though, because I wear embroidered guayberas rather than ornamental waistcoats, and I don't smoke at all.

** Not Professor Lewis! No waistcoat or pipe!

Impossible Worlds

Most definitions of fantasy involve the supernatural or the impossible. A typical example can be found in Manlove’s Modern Fantasy. He there defines fantasy as

…a fiction evoking wonder and containing a substantial and irreducible element of supernatural or impossible worlds, beings or objects with which the mortal characters or the readers of the story become on at least partly familiar terms.

I think that this is a good definition as far as it goes. It dwells on material elements, but then, the definition of any art-form necessarily does. For instance, a painting is an arrangement of pigments on a plane surface. It’s our idea of what sort of beauty painting aims at that allows us to argue whether a particular piece is or isn't good. Still, when I come to consider what sort of beauty fantasy aims at, I wonder if Manlove's definition doesn’t miss the point after all. A painting without ground or pigments can't very well be conceived. But can we conceive of a fantasy without "supernatural or impossible worlds," etc.? Perhaps so, in a way. Certainly some existing fantasies come very close, e.g., Titus Groan, as Manlove concedes. And it is easy to think of books that involve the elements Manlove lists but that are almost universally recognized as being something other than fantasy.

What is crucial, I think, is not the possibility or impossibility of the world, but the way the world is presented. It’s just that "impossible" worlds lend themselves to this sort of holistic presentation. The crumbling castle-world of Gormenghast is a well-considered, closed system, and its denizens are woven into its very fabric. The same is true of Middle-Earth, Perelandra, Narnia, Tormance, Earthsea, and Arrakis. Perhaps this interdependence of inhabitants and environment is what makes fantasy fantasy.

Gary Wolfe, in "The Encounter with Fantasy," argues that it is a mistake to regard fantasy merely as the fictional presentation of the supernatural or the impossible, or even as fiction that "evokes wonder"—the latter being a subjective criterion that allows for no bad fantasies. Wolfe suggests that the overall affective structure is what makes fantasy fantasy. For fantasy has both a cognitive and an affective aspect. The latter may be a little difficult to get our hands on, but it is nevertheless an objective element.

Wolfe goes on to note that the most successful fantasies overlie an objective set of beliefs held by the author. One has the Christian Platonism of Lewis, for instance, or the Catholicism of Tolkien, or the Taoism of Le Guin, or the anti-Aestheticism of Lindsay, or the quasi-Nietzschean paganism of Eddison. However, these beliefs are subordinate to the final form of the work as a work of fantasy, and one need not share them to enjoy the work in question.

Fantasy indeed tries to set us free by making us captive to belief, but since the kind of belief that is peculiar to fantasy arises as much from affect as from cognition, it is not necessary for us to share an author's philosophies or beliefs that are external to the work for us to accept and "believe in" their embodiment in the narrative… Fantasy authors who are most successful at creating his kind of belief attempt neither to allegorize their own systems of belief nor to subordinate those systems to sensation. Instead, they achieve a balanced tension—perhaps more properly a dialectic—between cognition and affect, between moralism and passion, between the impossible and the inevitable. They do not merely construct metaphors for a preconceived reality, or if they do, the power of the metaphors is apt to transform the nature of those preconceptions into something new.

The focus on material elements such as elves and imaginary countries is what leads to all the delightful hair-splitting one finds in wikipedia articles on the subject, arguments about which category such-and-such a book really fits into based on the presence of this or that element. It is all quite beside the point apart from the purely commercial point of view. Books like Dune or The Time Machine should be classed with books like The Lord of the Rings or A Voyage to Arcturus or the Earthsea trilogy. If they aren’t, then the lines need to be redrawn.