My Take on Reality

Tell me this isn’t a fairy tale evil king’s throne.

The other day I saw a post on Mythic Scribes that asks whether black and white fantasy is dead. As usual, I read the article and came away thinking along entirely different lines than the topic intended.* The essay examines the popularity of morally gray fantasy, centered on the tremendous success of A Song of Ice and Fire, and wonders what this means for old fashioned good-versus-evil fantasy stories.

Instead of pondering these questions, I realized something else: A Song of Ice and Fire is about what happens after the Happily Ever After. Think about the events of some seventeen years prior to the series:

• There’s a mad and indisputably evil monarch on the throne who enjoys burning people alive with wildfire.

• The evil tyrant goes too far one day, burning alive the betrothed of a handsome knight, a powerful warrior. Worse, this woman is the sister of the knight’s unfailingly loyal and honorable best friend (read sidekick).

• The handsome knight rallies the good people of the kingdom to war and marches on the evil tyrant.

• The evil tyrant hatches a plot to burn down the city around him so he can be reborn as a dragon.

• The evil tyrant’s bodyguard, himself a handsome and mighty knight, saves the lives of the city (and his father, and his father’s army) by killing the tyrant and foiling the plot.

• Good conquers evil. The handsome knight becomes king. Though he mourns the passing of his would-be-bride, he weds the richest and most beautiful lady in the land.

The setup for the series is practically a fairy tale, with Robert Baretheon as the Hero and Eddard Stark as his Loyal Sidekick. The difference is that where the original storyteller might have ended with “and they lived happily ever after,” George R. R. Martin said, “what if this isn’t where everything comes together in harmony, but where everything starts to fall apart? What would that look like?”

This has been done before, of course. I think the most famous example in modern storytelling is The Princess Bride. The tagline on the back of the book says it all: “What happens when the most beautiful girl in the world marries the handsomest prince in the world – and he turns out to be a son of a bitch?” The fairy tale setup is the beginning, not the end.

People love to retell the classic fairy tales, and for good reason. But I think it’s interesting how many more stories can be generated by taking their happily ever afters and saying, “what next?”

What other stories can you think of that start where an unrelated story left off?

(Hmm. I’ve been yakking about A Song of Ice and Fire a lot lately. Probably because I watch Game of Thrones, and we’re mid-season. Perhaps I’ll throw in more variety if I start watching Defiance. I hear it’s gotten better since the first episode. I’ve also started reading The Conqueror’s Shadow by Ari Marmell, so maybe that will help too. Of course, I also just read Doublesight by Terry Persun, so maybe I should say something about shapeshifting…)

*This is one reason I enjoy reading writing craft books. Not only do I get to keep learning about writing, but I always come up with story ideas and twists that have only tenuous links to what I’m reading, at best.

Yeah, this happens but it’s not the image I’d've chosen.

Sometime during my youth I picked up a copy of Wizard War, by Hugh Cook. I like wizards. Fantasy war is often entertaining. Seemed like a natural choice. Nevertheless, as often happens, it sat on my shelf for a couple of years before I got around to reading it.*

It wasn’t what I was expecting. Oh, the magic system intrigued me, but that is to be expected. What surprised me is that it was less a battle of good and evil and more about interesting characters opposing each other because of how they viewed the world. I read it, enjoyed it, and moved on. After all, it was a standalone novel.

Or so I thought.

Years passed, perhaps a decade, and I ran across the author’s name again on a book called The Hero’s Return. It had a subtitle: Wizard War Chronicles III. Three? This was a series?** Well, they had book three but not book two, and who knew when I would ever find book two? I sighed and moved on.

But I kept thinking about it, and the internet kept expanding. Finally these two factors came together and I decided to dig around for what I could find out about this series. It turns out that Wizard War was the American title of The Wizards and the Warriors, a British book with a more accurate title. The Wizards and the Warriors was the first novel in a ten volume series called Chronicles of an Age of Darkness. The series covers a period of thirty years, with each book taking the perspective of a different character (although some main characters show up as minor characters in other books).

The series sounded deep and fascinating. And here I had only the first book.

I think you see what’s coming. I listed the titles of the series and kept it on me whenever I visited a used book store. I tagged the books in Paperback Swap in case any surfaced. The books had been reissued in expensive trade paperbacks (over $30 each), but I wanted the old mass market paperbacks. They had better cover art.

I built up my collection slowly over the course of more than a decade, a copy here, a copy there. By 2010 I had all the books except one: The Witchlord and the Weaponmaster. That one seemed impossible to find. It hadn’t even been reissued in the trade paperback the way the others had. Instead the author put it up on Lulu for about $40 ($20 for the .pdf).***

Two weeks ago I got the e-mail notification from Paperback Swap: a copy had come in and I was first in line, if I wanted it. No picture. No statement about condition. But it was there. I pounced on it.

It’s on my desk as I type.

One of my summer plans now is to sit and read the whole series. I haven’t read Wizard War in some twenty years. After all this legwork, I don’t honestly know if I’ll love these books or hate them. But I get to find out firsthand now, and that has made it all worthwhile.

*This is never a statement about an individual book, just about how backlogged I am on my reading.

**I once asked Holly Lisle how to approach writing a series. She said, “Don’t.” She pointed to limited shelf space in book stores, unavailability of other books in the series, declining orders and so forth. All valid reasons in the old days, and this series was an example of those problems in action.

***Actually, I found a website that says Hugh Cook put it up. But Wikipedia says he died in 2008 and Lulu says the book was posted in 2011, so I don’t know the facts.

My flash fiction story “Ask the Cats” will be published in an upcoming issue of Fireside Magazine.

I always considered that one a challenge piece. It came about because a friend (another writer) turned to me and said, apropos of nothing, “Your next story should be called ‘Ask the Cats.’” I sat down that night and wrote it.

Shall we discuss your vocabulary?

So, it’s Thursday and I’m still thinking about Sunday’s Game of Thrones episode. Without going into spoiler-level details, there’s a great scene with Daenerys Targaryen. How good is it? Well, I almost went online and bought a Targaryen house tee-shirt.

But I’m not here today to advertise for HBO. I’ve been thinking about language, culture and translation in fantasy. For three or so episodes now, there’s been a salesman referring to Daenerys as a “bitch” and a “Westerosi whore.” But I wasn’t thinking about the “whore” crack, despite the included assumptions that the speaker’s culture has a paid sex trade that is held in poor esteem and not, for example, a form of divine service. No, I kept coming back to the word “bitch.”

I could not recall seeing dogs in the background of the city where this salesman lived. He never referred to people from Westeros as dogs. And yet, the subtitles told me that the man’s preferred term of opprobrium for Daenerys was to call her a female dog.

Mind you, ‘bitch’ is a word with a long and storied history … here in the United States. I’m sure it owes its development to use in Europe as well. But this story doesn’t take place in the United States, nor Europe, nor anywhere in our world. And yet, there was the word, used the same way it would see colloquial use here (not necessarily the way it’s used in rap, but that’s a whole different post).

I found myself thinking about a character I play in a Runequest game, a hunter. For this character, dogs hold a prominent cultural place. These human beings communicate as easily and clearly with their dogs as they do with each other. Brother Dog is one of their gods. In Balazar (this hunter’s homeland) if a woman were called a bitch, the speaker would be paying a great compliment to her hunting skills. In fact, since most of their hunters are men, “bitch” might be the Balazari term for a female hunter, but you better believe it wouldn’t be an insult.

So, back to the world of A Song of Ice and Fire. The salesman called Daenerys a bitch.

Or did he?

Now we bump up against translation issues in fantasy stories. It could be that the term the salesman spoke was some local insult of about the same magnitude as our modern word ‘bitch.’ Thus, in translation on the screen for a modern English-speaking audience, the word read ‘bitch.’

But that excludes the option of adding a little more world-building by telling the audience the local insult, perhaps giving it context for their understanding. True. But would that add to the story or would it just be a pointless distraction?

I remember a Sopranos episode when the mob guy Christopher gets to watch Jon Favreau film a scene involving Janeane Garofalo and Sandra Bernhard. One is supposed to call the other a bitch, and she stops the scene because ‘bitch’ isn’t an interesting enough word. Christopher suggests the Italian word ‘pucchiaca’ instead. That works when you have multiple real languages and reference points. But in a novel, the writer has only what the reader will consent to sit through, which means everything needs to move the story along or fall by the wayside.

A rabbit is a rabbit, whether you call it a rabbit or a smeerp. Of course, it can be argued that a smeerp is a smeerp too, and shouldn’t be confused with a rabbit. The way I look at it, if there’s something significant about smeerps in the story that the reader needs to know, then make them smeerps. Otherwise, they might as well be rabbits.

In the same way, the salesman could have called Daenerys something else, but unless that something else would be important later, he might as well just call her a bitch.

He couldn’t call her a smeerp, of course. That would just be silly.

We know where XKCD stands on the issue.

What do you think? Is ‘bitch’ a good enough word to show up in translation in a fantasy story or would it disappoint you?

When something tragic happens on a large scale, my first instinct is to shut up. A lot of people like to go on social media to wish the victims and their families well, or to spread information, but I just can’t do it. Enough people spread the information without my adding more noise – and the Boston explosions have led so far to more speculation than answers – and however much I would like to offer my sympathies and condolences to human beings in pain, something about doing so online rings hollow to me. I’m just a stranger to these people. Those affected aren’t likely to ever even read my words, much less care what I have to say. Expressing my sadness on their behalf without communicating it to them feels … indecent somehow.

Please, note that this is just my hang-up, and has no bearing on who you are, what you feel, or what you say online.

Part of me says that I should proceed with business as usual, posting silly thoughts on Twitter or yakking about roleplaying games, speculative fiction, and the Giants as though nothing had happened. But that feels disrespectful, as though I were saying that because the tragedy didn’t affect me directly, it didn’t matter.

So I shut up. I wait a day or two, and watch the news sometimes, when I think they have something real to say. And I wonder. I wonder about the people who did it, what they wanted, how they planned it, how they picked their target and timing, and most of all what could motivate someone to do something so heinous. I wonder about our politicians and their triplet reactions: wanting to do something, wanting to spin the event for political gain, and wanting to slip in other agenda while no one is looking.

Most of all this time I wonder about the media. The ratings-driven, get-them-watching/keep-them-watching media. They give us cameramen who center shots on suffering children. They give us talking heads who claim not to spread rumors while naming every rumor they won’t spread. They speculate ad nauseum, then give us “expert analysis” of their speculation, lending credence in the minds of viewers to the idea that they have actual information.

And that doesn’t include the outlets that are nothing more than propaganda machines spewing political rhetoric.

I wonder whether the news was ever as good and honest as people like to think it was. Or maybe, like with politicians, the information age has simply shown us a look behind the curtain at what has been there all along – people crafting public information to suit their personal needs. I don’t mean that every person involved in the media is evil. I just mean that the end result always seems to slant toward the money, one way or another.

Somewhere around this point, I usually get depressed, and seek distraction. This time it led me to a realization: there is no accurate way to model our news media in fiction. Anything the writer does will seem to the reader to be better or worse than the real thing.

Consider Babylon 5’s ISN. They were a solid, reliable source of journalism, the way most of us like to think the news used to be. Then ISN was forced to serve the government’s political agenda, as a way of demonstrating to viewers the government’s corruption. Then, when ISN is later freed from the government, this is a cause for celebration, a sign of freedoms returned.

How different would the show have been, had Straczynski chosen instead to require his characters to sift through a variety of news sources to figure out what was really happening in the galaxy? To strip away for themselves the political and financial agenda?

But I guess that’s why they say that fiction is life without the boring parts. Here in the real world it’s not so simple.