The excerpt below is also from Mary Sisson’s Trust (see previous posting).

This scene actually precedes the one in the previous post (sorry–out of order, I know). it is actual moment of first contact when Daring Attack sees Trang and his marines before they have the universal translator present.

Since the universal translator is not yet in the scene, language is not the thing being held up in the “mirror” for us to examine. Instead, Daring Attack focuses on our physical form, which, to him is very strange as his species is an eye-less quadruped with no “head,” to speak of. His first guess is that the humans might be Mechanical Aliens (i.e. remotely operated drones operated by a third species of alien that can’t move around in air).

Excerpt One

He was closer to the Mechanical Aliens now. He could hear them.

“Oupa oupa oupa!” said one.

“Oupa oupa,” replied another.

The aliens were mostly sticking near their vehicle, folding something up. But one of them began walking closer to where Daring Attack was. As it came closer, Daring Attack realized with a start that it had only two legs.

A Two-legged Alien, not a Mechanical Alien, he thought. Unless the Mechanical Aliens also have only two legs.

No, he decided, as he watched the alien tip forward, lurch a leg underneath itself to keep itself from falling, and then repeat the process. It was a miracle the thing didn’t just flop over and wriggle about helplessly on the ground. This two-legged thing is too bizarre to have been ignored.

(And then later when they find the translator and can talk to him)

The Two-legged Aliens said they were happy to see him, which made Daring Attack wonder if he had overreacted when they surrounded him—maybe they had just been curious. In any case, after a few minutes of conversation with the diplomat, the four in the brush stepped back out into the clearing.

Not that talking to them was any less unnerving. Close up, Daring Attack could see that the aliens had this ball-shaped appendage that was connected to the rest of their body by only a slender stalk, which looked like it could be chopped through in an instant. This appendage never stopped wobbling—it would wobble when they talked, it would wobble when they were silent, and when they walked, the appendage wobbled atop their wobbly, lurching bodies.

It made Daring Attack dizzy.

 

God I love that. Those last four of five lines had me laughing out loud.

Some of the best spec-fic holds up a mirror in such a way that we see aspects of our species/culture anew. Often this is accomplished by showing first contact. Ursula Leguin’s Left Hand of Darkness comes to mind, with its human diplomat arriving at a planet of hermaphrodites; also Larry Niven’s Ringworld, with its humans, puppeteers, and kzinti.

The First-contact Mirror

I recently found a hilarious first-contact mirror in Mary Sisson’s novel Trust (sequel to Trang), which follows the human diplomat Phillipe Trang as he interacts with five or six different species of alien.

In these scenes, inter-species communication is made possible by a Universal Translator device, which struggles to decode the expletives of the human space marines assigned to protect Trang. Since the POV in the scene is that of the alien, the results are hilarious and thought provoking.

Excerpt from Trust

(Setting: Trang and his marines meet the alien (named Daring Attack) near their crash site on a wild and remote part of an alien planet as a giant T-rex-like thing referred to as a “Giant Mankiller”  approaches through the jungle. The dialogue starts with the marine nick-named Princess).

“I cannot see it,” said Noble Person, who was holding a machine to its face.

“Of course not—if it was that close, we’d be dead,” said Daring Attack.

“What distance—” Noble Person stopped.

“His units for measuring length—” said the diplomat.

“I am knowledgeable of that fact,” said Noble Person. “If the carnivore continues toward us at the rate of travel at which it is currently traveling, at what time will it reach us?”

“His units for measuring time—” said the diplomat.

“May it remain for eternity in the mythological place where the spirits of the ignoble dead reside!” said Noble Person.

“I express my regret,” said the diplomat.

“There it is,” said the alien holding the sheet.

“Sacred digestive by-product,” said Noble Person.

Daring Attack tried not to dwell on the fact that he was risking his life for people who worshipped digestive by-products. Instead, he noticed a large dark blob on the sheet.

“Mythological figure who regained life after being dead for three days and is engaged in reproductive activity, it is large,” said the other alien.

“Is that the carnivore?” asked Noble Person.

Daring Attack looked at the blob. Was that the Giant Mankiller? He couldn’t tell.

(When the marines send armed drones to attack the Giant Mankiller, the marines watch through video monitors, muttering…)

“Draw closer on, you small individual conceived in a socially inappropriate manner,” said the alien. “Draw closer and obliterate that buzzing flying insect that is engaging in reproductive activity with you.”

Has it gone insane? Daring Attack wondered.

After I was done howling with laughter, these are some of the things I found myself thinking about: 

Why do humans use feces and sex in expletives? Okay, we’re primates, we like to throw poo, and now that we have words to do it with, we don’t need to get our hands dirty. I get that. But sex?  Do all human cultures do that, or just puritanical Western ones? For that matter, do (puritanical) Islamic cultures do that? Do Hindis? Do the Chinese? The Japanese?  Maori?  Australian Aborigines? Are we all sex-and-potty mouths?

If you are fluent in these cultures, please comment and share.

One of the best things about speculative fiction is the joy of pure invention, riffing off of  patterns we see in the Nature. The florescent flora of Miranda, in Avatar, comes to mind–stunningly beautiful, inspired perhaps by some of the bioluminescence of the sea.

    

(Image of flora in Avatar)                      (Image of florescent sea anemone)

Here is a passage from Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide that I thought beautiful, inspired perhaps by the symbioses we see among sea creatures–from whales to crabs–like barnacles, remoras, and whale lice.

The orchid crabs were migrating to the sea. They scuttled across the sand road, swamping it under their numbers. Bright parasitic flowers waved gently on their armor, making the forest floor ripple under a carpet of multicolored petals, like a submarine garden seen through clear fathoms of Ocean brine.

 

May 30, 2012

Dear Drew,

I saw you at Racer on days I came to write. One night you performed with your band, and I was impressed with the raucous creativity and character in your music. You kind of freaked me out, to be honest. The piercings, ink all over your hands and arms, weird-ass red dot make-up on your nose and cheeks. (Who does that? How does a guy like that get work to support his art?)

But I also admired it. I saw that I shared a similar dedication to creativity, and thought often about the different paths we took, both artists, but my path so safe, yours without any compromise I could see. And yet, don’t all paths require compromise? Don’t all ways exact sacrifice?

I took a cigar break one night on the bench outside the Racer, and you left the bar to have a cigarette.  We exchanged a few words of greeting. When you finished your cigarette, you muttered, “Fuuuck…” and went back in.  As in, “What the fuck do I say to a cigar-smoking dude without tats or nose rings and face dots, a guy with kids and a house?”  Worlds of experience separate us. Or do they? Turned out, you were totally non-judgmental and open in later conversations. Interested even in the dermally unadorned.  Eventually I hoped to learn where you came from, what influenced your decisions, when you chose your path, and what the deal is with those fucking red dots.

Your band mate, I think, was with you sometimes. She plays the fiddle, doesn’t she? She’d sit at the bar with an iPad while you drank and talked. Once on a Sunday morning I found the two of you two sitting outside, nursing beers, staring through a fog of cigarette smoke at a dressed-up young family crisply pushing a stroller up the street.  The lady’s high heels clicked and echoed in still air between the buildings.  They refrained from looking over at you, which made me smile.

“Better hurry up,” I said to you. “You’ll be late for church.”

“I got my church,” you said, toasting your can. “Church of Rainier.”

It wasn’t the first time I saw you at the bar before noon. Today was the last; through the photos from the security camera in the café I see you in your usual place at the middle of the bar, slumped and smiling like you just woke up and came down for pleasant company and a beer to ease into consciousness. The photo is taken from the moment the asshole entered, before anyone knew what he was up to.  Ironically, I had been thinking of taking a day to write this week, and if it hadn’t been for a trick of rescheduling at work I might have been there today.  I might have been the girl in the left side of the frame, above the asshole with the gun. We can see the paperback she holds (I wonder what she was reading, and why she’d come in that day. Was she stopping in for a quiet read before work? Taking a break from studying for her nursing exam—seems like there are lots of nursing students at Racer, poring over physiology texts). The guy a couple stools down was also reading.

They showed a second security frame with a more frontal view of the asshole’s face as he’s leaving.  The time log at the bottom shows it was almost exactly a minute later.  All the stools are empty now. Several are toppled. None of your companions remain at the counter, nor is the chef behind the counter, or the girl with the paperback at her chair. Her phone remains on the table in perfect alignment with the edge, as if she’d been waiting for the screen to light up. Your beer sits alone, exactly where it was a minute before.

I’ll never get to learn what brought you there. Never know what the hell was up with the red dots, or if our differences were illusion. I’ll never get to overcome my fear of your weirdness to see if we’re brothers. I’ll never know you. The rest is silence.

I’ll end this with a valediction from As You Like It, a play in which the character Touchstone is sometimes played with red dots on nose and cheeks.

Hereafter, in a better world than this, I shall desire more love and knowledge of you.

Rest in peace, Drew. No, scratch that. Why should the next world be restful?  Burst upon it singing and inspiring spirits, as you did here in our neighborhood cafe.

Stephen Merlino

 

One of the best primers on fantasy world building I have seen is Diana Wynne Jones’s Tough Guide to Fantasyland. Wikipedia describes it as a loving sendup of common fantasy tropes, which it is, but it can also beread as a cautionary primer for writers against unexamined fantasy clichés. 

Years ago the book was recommended to me by the leader of Seattle Writer’s Cramp, Steve Gurr, when he pointed out some arbitrary apostrophes I’d inserted into place names or secondary character names in the novel I was submitting for critique at the time.  (His point about the apostrophes wasn’t that one ought not use apostrophes in imaginary place names, but that if I am not a linguist, like Tolkien was, I might consider doing that sparingly.  (And yes, Jones does have a humorous entry on Apostrophes in the book.)

I read all of Tough Guide to Fantasyland and found numerous inspirations to reconsider elements of my worldbuilding which I had not before examined.

Here are a couple examples of instructive and humorous entries in the Tough Guide:

COLOR CODING: is very important in Fantasyland. Always pay close attention to the color of the CLOTHING, hair and eyes of anyone you meet.  It will tell you a great deal. Complexion is also important: in many cases it will be color coded too.
1. Clothing. Black garments normally mean EVIL, but in rare cases it may mean sobriety, in which cases a white ruffled collar will be added to the ensemble.  Gray and red clothing mean that the person is neutral but ending to EVIL in most cases. Any other color is GOOD, unless too many bright colors are worn at once, in which instance the person will be unreliable. Drab color means the person will take little part in the action, unless the drab is also torn or disreputable, when the person will be a loveable rogue.
2. Hair. Black hair is EVIL, particularly if combined with a corpse-white complexion. Red hair always entails magical POWERS, even if these are only latent. Brown hair has to be viewed in combination with eyes whose color are the real giveaway (see below), but generally implies niceness. Fair hair, especially if it is silver-blonde, always means goodness.
3. Eyes. Black eyes are invariably EVIL; brown eyes mean boldness and humor, but not necessarily goodness; green eyes always entail talent, usually for magic but sometimes for music; hazel eyes are rare and seen generally to imply niceness; gray eyes mean niceness and healing abilities (see HEALERS) and will be reassuring unless they look silver (silver-eyed people are likely to enchant or hypnotize you for their own ends, although they are not always EVIL); white eyes usually blind ones, are for wisdom (never ignore anything a white-eyed person says); blue eyes are always GOOD, the bluer, the more good present; and then there are violet and golden eyes. People with violet eyes are often of Royal, and, if not, always live uncomfortably interesting lives. People with golden eyes just live uncomfortably interesting lives, and are usually rather fey in the bargain. Both these types should be avoided by anyone who wishes for a quiet life. Luckily it seldom occurs to those with undesirable eye colors to disguise them with ILLUSION, and they can generally be detected very readily. Red eyes can never be disguised. They are EVIL and are surprisingly common.
4. Complexion. Corpse-white is evil, and it grades from there. Pink-faced folk are generally midway and pathetic. The best face-color is brown, preferably tanned, but it can be inborn. Other colors such as black, yellow, blue and mauve barely exist.
So, if a character is wearing green, is blue-eyes and brown-faced, you will probably be okay. CAUTION: do not apply these standards to our own world. You are likely to be disappointed.

CLOTHING:  Although this varies from place to place, there are two absolute rules:

1. Apart from ROBES, no garment thicker than a SHIRT ever has sleeves.

2. No one ever wears socks.

COATS: do not exist in Fantasyland–CLOAKS being universally preferred–but TURNCOATS do.

CLOAKS:  are the universal outer garb of everyone who is not a barbarian. It is hard to see why. They are open in the front and require you at most times to use one hand to hold them shut. … etc.

Here is a link to the book on Amazon. It’s a wonderful read-out-loud to like-minded geek friends.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Tough-Guide-Fantasyland-Essential/dp/0142407224/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1338079191&sr=8-1

 

I take a lot of inspiration and instruction from Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide. The book is full of fantastic inventions that he limns with only in the lightest brushstrokes.  I referred to his “surrogate” technology in the post on “Filtering Setting Through Character POV”.  In this post I want to share two other examples: one of the “jug” dwellings in the riverbanks on Miranda; the other of a drug/toxin derived from a bacterium or micro organism.

First, the jugs.

This far east, the farmland was too rich to squander, and save for the plantation buildings, most dwellings hugged the river. Unpainted clapboard houses teetered precariously on the lip of a high earth bluff. Halfway down to the water, a walk had been cut into the earth and planked over to serve a warren of jugs and storerooms dug into the banks itself (176).

He doesn’t tell us what a jug is. He just refers to them, because his POV character, the bureaucrat, knows what they are, and would not pay them any particular notice, so we don’ t get to either.  It isn’t until eight paragraphs later when the bureaucrat is inside a cafe that we learn.

…In a niche by the table a television was showing a documentary on the firing of the jugs. There was antique footage of workers sealing up the new-dug clay. Narrow openings were left at the bottom of what would be the doors, and to the top rear of the tunnels.  Then the wood packed inside was fired.  Pillars of smoke rose up like the ghosts of trees and became a forest whose canopy blotted out the sun. The show had been playing over and over ever since its original broadcast on one of the government channels.  Nobody noticed it any more.

“The heat required to glaze the walls was—”  The bureaucrat reached over and changed the channel  (176-177).

What I love about this is that he trusts me as a reader enough to let me hang for eight paragraphs before I find out what it means.  Yes, I had to read the first description twice, because I didn’t know what a “jug” was, but there was enough context for me to assume it was some kind of dug-out dwelling space, and that was enough for me to go on till I got some more description.

He could have explained it right away:  …a warren of storerooms and jugs, ceramic-walled rooms carved from the clay and baked in place with massive internal bonfires or something, but that would have bogged down the action at hand.

In the end, was this neat invention relevant to the action at hand?  No. in that regard it’s a throwaway detail.  But in terms of sustaining the protagonist’s sense of alien landscape and people, a kind of stranger-in-a-strange land vulnerability and therefore tension—it was.

Here’s how he introduces the drug/toxin.

Pouffe sat opposite the two of them, his back to the land. His face was puffy and unhealthy in the window light. His eyes were two dim stars, unblinking…

Gregorian walked over to Pouffe, and crouched. He cut a long sliver of flesh from the old shopkeeper’s forehead. It bled hardly at all. The flesh was faintly luminous, not with the bright light of Undine’s iridobacteria but with a softer, greenish quality. It glowed in the magician’s fingers, lit up the inside of his mouth, and disappeared. He chewed noisily.

“The feverdancers are at their peak now. Ten minutes earlier and they’d still be infectious. An hour later and their toxins will begin to break down.’ He spat out the sliver into his palm, and cut it in two with his knife. “Here.” He held one half to the bureaucrat’s lips. “Take. Eat.”

The bureaucrat turned away in disgust.

“Eat!” The flesh had no strong smell; or else the woodsmoke drowned it out…He obeyed (232).

(The bureaucrat then experiences hallucinations, out-of-body experience, into-Gregorian’s memory experience, like the pensieve in Harry Potter, and that’s all we get.)  He could have had Gregorian explain what the toxins do, and how they work—he could have had the bureaucrat muse on what he knew of feverdancers, but he doesn’t. We are left to assume all that from these few clues, and it is enough.

Light brush strokes, carefully limited by the POV character’s POV.

 

I think the falcon-chick affect (see preceding post for explanation of this syndrome) is why a writer’s first novel generally doesn’t have a prologue. For a falcon chick reader, the prologue is the ultimate sucker punch.  It’s like saying, “Here, read this prologue, bond with the prologue protagonist, then learn in the first chapter that she died ten centuries before the main story begins.”

This may be why agents and editors don’t like to put them in a debut novelist’s first novel. Established writers can get away with using prologues, because they already have an audience that trusts them, and because they are less likely to use a prologue as an expository crutch.

Sampling a few debut novels from the last couple years seems to bear this out:

• Thunderer, by Felix Gilman: no prologue.
• The Windup Girl, by Paulo Baccigalupi: no prologue.
• Low Town, by Daniel Polansky: no prologue.
• The Girl of Fire and Thorns: no prologue.
• The Desert of Souls, by Howard Jones: no prologue.

Notably, Gilman’s sequel, City of Gears, has a prologue. He proved himself.

Still, being an established author does not override my falcon-chick complex.  I can think of a few established authors I put down after I bonded with a prologue character who never reappears in the novel. Saberhagen’s The Book of Swords was one. Tigana, by Guy Gabriel Kay, was another. The only exception that comes to mind is the prologue to Martin’s A Game of Thrones, where the character relationships were so gorgeously crafted that (ironically) I forgave him when they died.

Kristin Nelson’s “Agent Reads the Slushpile” Workshop

I also noticed yesterday that when Kristin Nelson held a recent “first-pages” workshop she instructs participants to send the first couple pages of their manuscript: “It needs to be the actual, opening first 2 pages of your manuscript. If you have a prologue, skip it and grab page 1 and 2 from your chapter one.” That may be a coded form of Vonnegut’s advice to “throw away the first couple pages, because that’s where you explain everything” (see earlier posting on Vonnegut’s Writing Advice).

So the message to new writers of fantasy is clear: ditch the prologue till you’ve published. Of course, I had to be told this myself. In the fist draft of my first novel I had one. And it was hard to let it go: prologues are a nice crutch for exposition, and losing it made me work harder.

When a falcon chick hatches, it bonds with its caretaker. In nature, it bonds with the parent falcons. Some falconers prefer parent-raised falcons, but others prefer hawks who have imprinted upon the falconer, so they make sure the first thing the little chick sees when it opens its eyes is the smiling falconer, food in hand.

Readers are like falcon chicks. When we open our eyes in the new world of a novel, we imprint on the first POV character we meet. I do, anyway, and many readers I know do, too: we bond with the first character we meet, and we expect the story to stick with them. If it turns out we bonded with a shill, a throwaway prologue character who never appears again in the book, or with some secondary character whose purpose was to somehow ease me into the world or plot, then I feel cheated. It makes me peevish. Often, I’ll ditch the book right there, as I did with Saberhagen’s immortal swords tome, and Guy Gabriel Kay’sTigana (I know! It’s supposed to be magnificent! I should have skipped the prologue!).

The only way I can explain my reaction to this misplaced imprinting is that the bonding state of my mind at the beginning of a novel is a vulnerable state of receptiveness and trust; it doesn’t last long, and once it’s imprinted on someone/something, it’s done. Any further imprinting is forced and artificial and therefore uncomfortable and second rate.

My Lesson?  Start the Story with my Main Character

I enjoy the watching the literary gymnastics of a story featuring numerous POV characters. Some writers like George R.R. Martin in A Game of Thrones, swap POVs every chapter, and it is truly impossible to tell who the main character is. This is compounded by his willingness to kill off literally any of the twelve main characters he’s created. He’s a master. He can do that. And when he does, he bends the genre and the realm of what readers expect and can handle. Maybe someday that kind of head-hopping will be standard.

As a general rule, however, it’s still best for the rest of us to start with our main POV character in the first chapter, so readers imprint on him or her immediately. Most readers expect that, and to break custom with that can be disorienting.

I used to start one of my novels with a secondary character POV episode that I thought was a fun way to set the world and tone before the main character entered the story. Readers convinced me to move that passage to a later chapter when they were already grounded in their main character POV.

It’s also interesting to note that when a person scans the first pages of a book in a bookstore or on Amazon, part of what they are doing is assessing whether the main character is someone whose head they want to be in for the rest of the book. Having that character up front and center is part of their expectation, and part of what sells the book.

 

In the late 90s I lived in Charlottesville, Virginia, where I hung out with and did some contract writing for the guys at Iron Crown Enterprises, the creators of the wonderful Role Master fantasy role-playing system.

At the time they were designing a game world for a new series of modules, and the game designer, John Curtis, mentioned something that struck me as odd at the time and so it sticks with me today.  After explaining to me the intricacies of the world’s cosmology–how his world and it’s peoples were created by what gods and for what purposes–he said, “but that’s just half of it. Now I have to figure out how each of those peoples think the world was created and by whom for what purpose. None of the mortals would know the real story, only nuggets of truth here and there.”

I think of that as the “Through a glass, darkly” principle in worldbuilding. Even Christianity, which claims to be the sole true religion in this world, doesn’t claim that humans are capable of full understanding of the divine in this life. Of this world and the next Saint Paul wrote, “We see now through a glass darkly, but then we shall see face to face.” Likewise the mortals of ICE’s game world were granted only a dim and muddled view of its cosmological reality.

If you go with that metaphor for your world, the people’s mythologies will  be only a shadow of what is actually going on, warped by human passions and frailties and limitations.

Those warpings can be lots of fun.  They’ll show up in contradictory scriptural passages like “God is a jealous god”, “God is love,” and “Love is never jealous.”   (Wait, what?)  It will show up in confabulations of folklore and scripture, like some of the Jewish golem stories, and in outright imaginative superstition, like imbedding nails in the shape of a cross in the heel of your left boot to keep the devil off your trail, as Pap does in Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Making up your own versions of that is plain fun.

One of my favorite examples of a secondary world designed upon the “through the glass darkly” principle is Lois McMaster Bujold’s Curse of Chalion universe.  The gods in that world are very present but so inscrutable as to seem arbitrary at times, remote beyond human understanding. In books like that, I feel I’m being made to examine life and spirituality from a new angle, and I value that. But just as important is the simple verisimilitude of such crafting; it resonates with the way humans experience the divine in –through a glass, darkly–and thus brings credibility to the world.

Of course, you might well decide to create a world in which the gods live in the temples among their priests, and if there is any dispute in doctrine the priests simply ask the god, who settles it definitively.  (Such a world presents an entirely different set of challenges.)

In 1986 or so I attended a lecture given by Kurt Vonnegut at Pacific Lutheran University. It was a “Creative Writing” conference, and he was the keynote speaker. After an hour of ranting about Ronald Reagan, he paused, took a drink of water, and said, “Well, I guess I should say something about writing now, since this is an English major conference. So I’ll give you two pieces of advice. First of all, if you want to be a creative writer, don’ t be an English major. English majors learn too much taste, and once you learn to be tasteful, you can’t be creative. I was a Chemistry major.

“The other thing is this: Go ahead and write your story, then throw away the first pages, because that’s when you explain everything. And when you explain everything, no one gives a damn any more.”

Loved that guy. I could see the professors in the room forcing smiles on their rebellious faces.

I heard a game designer describe worldbuilding in a way that is also relevant to fantasy writers. He said, “You the designer have a floodlight, but the gamer only gets a flashlight.” What he meant by that is that as the designer or writer you know the world inside out–its history, its background, its mythology and geneologies–but the gamer or reader will never experience the vast majority of that. It’s for you, the designer to know, so you can steer the story.

It’s the same basic message as the iceberg metaphor: your world’s background would make great reading for an encyclopedia fetishist, but lousy slogging for story readers.

As it turns out, readers are as motivated by unanswered questions about your world as they are the cool things you reveal. It’s those unanswered “story questions” that keep the reader turning the pages to find out the answers.

(For more on the idea of not revealing to much to your readers, see entries below.)

Excellent spec fic writers build this absurdity into the worlds they create. Recently, I’ve noticed two wonderful examples of writers or directors who employ this understanding to great effect.  The first is George R. R. Martin, whose Slave Masters in the fifth Game of Thrones book have wonderfully absurd hairstyles sculpted in shapes like bird wings or rearing animals or supplicant hands in primary colors.  The women in that culture wear tokars, which are essentially a kind of fancy mummy wrap from the armpits down, making it almost impossible to walk.

The other example is the designer of the costumes, hairstyles and make-up of the elite “capitol” culture in the film adaptation of The Hunger Games. Wonderful worldbuilding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The wonderful absurdity of fashion is not a new phenomenon either, as witnessed by the bizarre confections of silk and wool dreamed up by renaissance tailors in Italy. Collars of any era are likely to have a high absurdity factor—think of the Virgin Queen, or John Travolta’s character in Saturday Night Fever.  Shoes are also common offenders, and hairstyles.

Recently I viewed a Roman tomb that captured in stone a noblewoman’s hairstyle from the decade she died, which appeared to be a mass of tight curls piled in what can be only be described as a cross between a beehive with a radar dish.

Bob paused in the shadow of the alley behind the inn, waiting for the fat man with the fatter purse to exit the bar and stumble by.  Across the river the Knarlytooth mountains rose to 8000 feet, glacially carved into spectacular spires of granite and dolomite. 

Seriously?  Why the hell would Bob pause to think about the geology of the mountains across the water?  Answer:  he wouldn’t!  So we don’t get to, either.  This POV is called “third person limited” and is the most common these days.  TPL means we the readers are passengers in the POV character’s mind, limited to what he notices.  In “third person omniscient” we would not be limited to his knowledge, but that POV is fairly rare these days.

The only way we get to learn about the mountains is if the mountains were somehow relevant to Bob in that scene–like, say, the moon was about to rise from behind them and reveal his position–then he’s worried about them, and so we get to see them.  It might go like this:

Bob paused in the shadow of the alley behind the inn, waiting for the fat man with the fatter purse to exit the bar and stumble by.  He glanced over his shoulder at the jagged peaks of the Knarleytooth mountains, the granite spires backlit with the rising moon. Two minutes, maybe less, he judged, before it cleared the lowest pass and illuminated the streets. He stifled a curse and turned his attention back to the inn. If his mark didn’t show soon, he’d have to give it up.

The rule here is this:  filter your world details through the point-of-view character.

Soon after reading Neutron Star for the first time, one of my students appeared with an asymmetric beard, and it actually looked pretty cool.  He had very thick facial hair, so he could do extremely precise designs in it; I imagine sparse beards would not look so good.   In any case, Niven’s use of the asymmetric beard got me thinking of the wonderful absurdity of fashions when viewed across cultures (or even within cultures).

No era is immune to this absurdity.  As evidence, I submit to you the saggy ass-pants of teen culture.  (Really?  You want to show me your underpants?) Nor is it only sub-cultures who are guilty, as anyone can tell you who has picked up their high school yearbook after twenty years away. If you haven’t lived that long and you think your high school yearbook pictures look “bomb,” just you wait.  You’ll cringe. Or wait until you show them to your kids.  “Mommy, what was wrong with your hair?”

Exhibit two, my sophomore tolo picture.  That’s right.  I’m wearing a brown tuxedo with brown-accents on the ruffled shirt and cuffs.  Eat your heart out.

Larry Niven wrote a wonderful book called Neutron Star, which I love to read now and again. The book is a series of loosely related short stories in which he lays out the universe he would later use for Ringworld.  In one of the stories, he describes a character as having an “asymmetric beard” that was fashionable on his planet. Niven never gives us any more description than that—part of the genius of his story telling—and as a result my imagination conjured up all kinds of wild facial designs and effects, each on the face of a man confident that he looks good. 

At the time, I had never seen or imagined an asymmetric beard, so the idea tickled me.  It especially tickled me that Niven’s character considered his lopsided facial hair to be totally ordinary, even attractive, and it made me think how many things I wear that might be just as whimsical to an outsider.

This is one of the reasons we read fantasy and science fiction—to have the mirror held up to ourselves, a new glass in which to see our own assumptions and behaviors in a new way.

 

Bob paused in the shadow of the alley behind the inn, waiting for the fat man with the fatter purse to exit the bar and stumble by.  Across the river the Knarlytooth mountains rose to 8000 feet, glacially carved into spectacular spires of granite and dolomite. 

Seriously?  Why the hell would Bob pause to think about the geology of the mountains across the water?  Answer:  he wouldn’t!  So we don’t get to, either.  This POV is called “third person limited” and is the most common these days.  TPL means we the readers are passengers in the POV character’s mind, limited to what he notices.  In “third person omniscient” we would not be limited to his knowledge, but that POV is fairly rare these days.

The only way we get to learn about the mountains is if the mountains were somehow relevant to Bob in that scene–like, say, the moon was about to rise from behind them and reveal his position–then he’s worried about them, and so we get to see them.  It might go like this:

Bob paused in the shadow of the alley behind the inn, waiting for the fat man with the fatter purse to exit the bar and stumble by.  He glanced over his shoulder at the jagged peaks of the Knarleytooth mountains, the broken spires backlit with the rising moon. Two minutes, maybe less, he judged, before the moon cleared the lowest pass and illuminated the alley. He stifled a curse and turned his attention back to the inn. If his mark didn’t show soon, he’d have to give it up.

The rule here is this:  filter your world details through the point-of-view character. We the readers only get to see/experience what the POV character would notice.

Michael Swanwick does this masterfully in Stations of the Tide. Check out this passage from the first chapter. In it, the protagonist, known only as “the bureaucrat,” is of on a space ship, skimming over the surface of distant planet on a mission for his department.

“Smell the air,” Korda’s surrogate said.

The bureaucrat sniffed… “Could use a cleansing, I suppose.”

“You have no romance in your soul.” The surrogate leaned against the windowsill, straight-armed, looking like a sentimental skeleton. the flickering image of Korda’s face reflected palely in the glass. “I’d give anything to be down here in your place.”

That’s all you get for the explanation of what the hell a surrogate is, or who Korda is, because we are experiencing this passage through the bureaucrat’s POV, and to him a surrogate’s as common as a cordless phone to us, and he knows Korda well.  The bureaucrat will neither pause to reflect on the marvel of surrogate technology for our benefit, nor on his relationship with Korda, both of which he takes for granted; we are therefore left to piece it all together through his perspective as the story unfolds.

Their dialogue stretches over four pages, and it’s pretty easy to figure out that Korda is his boss, but we only get one small clue on each page as to what a surrogate is. Here are the clues, excerpted from the action of the dialogue.

…”Korda moved away from the window, bent to pick up an empty candy dish, and glanced at its underside. There was a fussy nervousness to his motions strange to one who had actually met him.  Korda in person was heavy and lethargic.  Surrogation seemed to bring out a submerged persona, an overfastidious little man normally kept drowned in flesh.”

…”The surrogate reopened the writing desk, removed a television set, and switched it on.”

…”They shook hands, and Korda’s face vanished from the surrogate. On automatic, the device returned itself to storage.”

In the end, I’ve pieced something together about this wonderful piece of worldbuilding known as the surrogate, and what I come up with is pretty damned cool. But Swanwick never explains it to us. He sticks religiously to what his POV would notice about the situation.

In the end, this sort of writing relies on me to do some of the lifting, and I dig that. It’s a big reason I buy everything he writes. There aren’t a lot of writers who do it as well as he does, and if I ever do it half as well I’ll be pretty damned proud of it.

Though I create a complex world in which my characters live, my readers only encounter a fraction of what I know of it. Only the tip of the iceberg is experienced by the readers, and that’s good!  The action would be smothered in exposition if the whole iceberg were hauled out onto the page.

I learned this the hard way, burying the action in my stories with details of setting.  The general rule I eventually came up with is this:  Reveal only as much information as is absolutely necessary for the reader to understand the action at hand. 

The best example of this sort of narrative economy I’ve ever read is in Michael Swanwick’s Stations of the Tide, for which he deservedly won the 1991 Nebula for best novel.  In fact, the economy is so severe in that novel that at times I felt my head spinning.  (What the hell’s a surrogate?  He doesn’t explain it. He just names it and moves on!)  And I enjoy that as a reader: he doesn’t hold my hand, he makes me work.

All the same, that kind of economy is probably why it won the Nebula, which is voted in by fantasy/scifi authors, rather than a Hugo, which is voted in by fans.

World Building:  Songs

Every culture has oral tradition, and before easy TV entertainment it was vitally important for entertainment and sharing ideas. Tolkien understood this, and peppered his work with everything from hobbit folk songs to elvish high poetry.

I don’t advocate lots of elvish poetry; many readers don’t have the patience for elvish epics any more.  But a few touches of oral culture lend authenticity and depth to an imagined world.

Example pending: