Planetfurry BBS

[Rabbit]

It occurred to me this month that I've given short shrift to a whole genre of fiction. In the past I've written columns on writing horror and science-fiction, but never one on fantasy. Indeed, in one of my columns I went far out of my way to praise the virtues of SF over fantasy. And yet, the bulk of my own work has been... Fantasy! So, let me wipe a little bit of egg off of my face and then we shall begin.

Fantasy is perhaps the largest and hardest-to-define genre in all of fiction. It encompasses everything from many of the episodes in Homer's Odyssey to, according to some purists who refuse to categorize it with SF, the Star Wars epics. While I've yet to come across a decent 'official' working definition of fantasy, in my own mind I've always defined it as any work that includes a 'fantastic' or 'unreal' element which consists of anything other then a logical development of current science. As a concrete example of what I mean, consider a story which involves humans changing into frogs. If it happens because a fairy princess waved her wand, the story is fantasy; if the transformation is the result of massive advancements in biological science, it's science fiction; and if some hideous, polysyllabic, demonically unpronounceable Thing inflicts that change on an unwilling, screaming victim, it's horror. While most horror stories are indeed fantasies and require precisely the same writing skills, in practice there is a fairly clear dividing line between the two genres. Almost all folklore can be described as fantasy, as can any 'magical' story.

It's only in my own lifetime that fantasy as a genre has become respectable for anything but children's stories. During my early years, bookstores devoted only eight or ten feet of running shelf-space to science fiction and fantasy combined. Even this tiny area, however, was unfairly divided. Usually, there was something like seven-and-a-half feet of SF, and several copies of the Lord of the Rings, which then comprised the total sum of mass-marketed English-language fantasy that existed in the entire world. There were no other fantasy books available to Joe Everyman; once he finished those four books, there was nothing else available anyplace, or at least not in my neck of the woods. Not even in the libraries! I recall well my own disappointment when, at about age fourteen, I finished The Return of the King and had nowhere, literally nowhere, else to turn for more. So much has changed since then for the fantasy reader, and all of it for the better! Today, there is far more fantasy being written and sold than SF. It has penetrated our society at every level, so that even mass-marketed TV programming abounds in fantasy-derived plotlines. Our world is much the richer as a result.

I've always believed that writing, like most art, is more about emotion than anything else. This is even more the case than usual with fantasy. An SF writer can impress a reader with the sheer intellectual scope of his concepts and ideas, and horror-story authors can always lean on the gross-out factor. But fantasy writers have to work without a net, so to speak. Today's readers are so jaded that it's very hard to enthrall them with the idea of, say, a man turned into a dog or perhaps rendered able to fly via magical means. All the easy ideas have been used over and over again, so that in order for a story to carry impact it simply must be sound in terms of basics like characterization, plot, narrative hook, and action, action, action. In this sense, fantasy is perhaps the most demanding genre of all; nothing falls flatter than magic badly written.

Which brings us right back to what makes fantasy fantastic: Magic, or some other unreal mystical force. In the end, when writing fantasy an author simply cannot help but deal with the issue of mysterious forces and the suspension of disbelief. I've seen various approaches taken towards this issue; some authors stick strictly to existing mythological structures, attributing everything to Seely and Unseely Faeries and the like. Others work out incredibly detailed magical systems with strict rules and limits laid out clearly for the reader. Me, I've always considered that one of Stephen King's most admirable talents as a writer is the way he can draw a reader so deeply into what begins as a totally mundane story that when fantastic things start to happen, no one even thinks to question them at all. He never explains his magic-systems in detail, nor where the demons ultimately come from. Yet his best works practically pulsate with the power of the fantastic elements that drive them, and his magic-makers leave tracks so deep in his readers' minds that many suffer from nightmares for months thereafter. Personally, I've made a conscious decision to try to emulate King's success in my own works by trying to initially frame the fantastic elements in a setting so emotionally loaded that the reader, caught up in the 'mundane' aspects of the story, really isn't in much of a mood to ask silly questions when my character casts a spell or shapeshifts into something else. It helps, I think, that both King and I tend to write in familiar, modern settings that the reader can easily immerse themselves in; I don't know if this approach could work for a fantasy set in, say, fourteenth-century China.

Another thing I consciously attempt in my work is to use a point-of-view character that is never in the least surprised to encounter magic or the fantastic. If the POV character is totally credulous when seeing his friend turned into a frog, then it is more likely that the reader will be credulous as well. While a lot of fantasy stories have been written in which the POV character is not anticipating an encounter with the fantastic, I frankly have never liked writing them. It's much harder to maintain a willing suspension of disbelief in such a tale, I think, and the longer the tale is the more true this becomes. On the other hand, other authors clearly more gifted than myself have done well with the 'shocked protagonist' approach.

I also try not to offer any more information about the nature of magic than I really need to, again in conscious emulation of King. There is no single large reason for this, but rather many small ones. One of these is that in general most such explanations take the form of exposition, the least-entertaining and emotion-engaging and therefore least-desirable of all story elements. Even when such explanations are successfully placed in plot-context, however, as a rule they tend to be dull space-fillers that neither advance the plot nor develop the characters. Far better, in my book, that things just are, that magic simply is, and that the shamans/priests/fair-folk can do what they can do because that, quite simply, is just the way things are.

This isn't to say that magic doesn't need rules -- far from it! Indeed, virtually any kind of fantastic element in virtually any kind of story requires the very strictest of regulation, lest the whole thing descend into a molten, meaningless glob of power-gaming. King's Wendigo in Pet Sematary, for example, had a very strictly limited kind of power. In my own Corpus Lupus, the only way to get magic to work is to torture someone to death. In the best of all possible fantasy books, the limiting rules are also key plot-drivers; in Corpus, since magic could only be derived from human sacrifice, I told my tale from the point of view of a homicide detective. I also capitalized upon my self-imposed restrictions further by hypothesizing that if magic was possible, then governments simply had to have a way of legally employing it, if for no other purpose than to combat illegal magic-users. This implied the existence of the Guild of Necromancers, which in turn caused me to consider the psychological and moral effects of being both legally empowered and professionally expected to torture dozens of innocents to death and then ritually mutilate the resulting corpses over the course of a career, and...

...well, read the book if you'd like. Suffice it to say that I ended up very proud of the uses I put my magic-limiting restrictions to.

Another thing to consider when introducing a fantastic element is how its existence will alter the world outside the immediate plotline of your tale. If you're doing an unexpected encounter in the mundane world, where magic is normally hidden away, then you will not encounter this problem. Everything will remain just as it is, because no one else besides your protagonist and other characters knows the real truth of things. If, on the other hand, you wish to write of a world where wizards operate out of storefronts and magic classes are taught on every streetcorner, then you also have to ask yourself how else this world might be different. For example, could mages also act as doctors, enchanting failing hearts and teleporting crystal-ball-detected gallstones out of pain-wracked bodies? If flying carpets are possible, what happens to the market for horses? Could knights fight effectively from carpet-back? If so, what might their fighting-equipment look like? What sort of saddle might they employ? Clearly, the primary problem is that magic is so damned useful that, if it existed in unlimited quantities, it would be applied to virtually every human problem from sewage treatment to erectile dysfunction to crappy network TV. Larry Niven dealt with this most brilliantly in his two novel-length fantasies The Magic Goes Away and The Magic May Return. (These two works are in my opinion required reading for any budding writer of fantasy.) Those of us less talented than Niven, such as myself, are far better served by a) finding a way to strictly limit the amount of magical power available to society and b) tossing the reader a few bones during the telling of a tale that show how the existence of magic has changed the way of things; in one work, for example, I mention in passing that the President has a spell-corrected heart defect, while in another there is an Internet support-group (complete with chatroom) for those Cursed to undergo involuntary transformation into other forms.

In the end, as stated earlier, the single most important factor in producing an excellent work of fantasy is emotional connection with the reader via characterization, setting, plot, and all the other basics. While handling the fantastic element properly is important, nothing can save a story that is weak on the basics. Like SF and most horror, fantasy involves a truly massive willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the reader.

Build a good foundation, and the rest will follow along just fine.


<This is a repost of the latest "Rabbit's Hutch", my periodical column on writing at TSAT magazine. It seemed to be on topic; so as long as no one complains I'll probably keep reposting the new ones here. Discussion and dissent are tremendously welcome.>

<Past columns can be found at http://tsat.xepher.net/index.html >

[Rabbit]

Thank _you_ for telling me about this place, Mike! =:)

[DragonWolf_keny]

I'll follow Mike's lead and say welcome as well and thank you for the insightful article. Please feel free to give us a little more. Fantasy is my premiere genera but I kind of like to dabble a little in Sci-Fi. I only wish there were a few more resources for weighting in fantasy. Sci-Fi has plenty, but I have not seen nearly any for my favored genre. <Mostly star wars or any star trek>

[Rabbit]

Thank you for the kind words!

While I prefer to write SF, because in my mind it comes out better, I generally write fantasy. However, via the magic of cut-and-paste, please find below a column I did on writing SF. It dates from 2001, Issue #20 of TSAT. The TSA part of TSAT stands for "Transformation Story Archive"; please note that my column there is centered on TF stories which often happen to be furry, not furry stories per se. This will explain why a few features of this column may seem a little odd to pure "fur" writers. I think the underlying opinions hold up pretty well for pure "furry" fiction, however.

Again, thank you for your interest!



Making Miracles

Last Labor Day weekend, I found myself standing in a hotel parking lot in Memphis, Tennessee with a group of close friends. It was about midnight or so, and this particular hotel was located directly under the approach path of the local airport. It had been raining off and on for some time, and the clouds hung low and thick.

As it happens, Memphis is the home base of Federal Express, the famous overnight parcel delivery service. Chatting quietly and companionably, we stood together and watched in quiet awe as a miracle took place right in front of our eyes. One after another, a seemingly endless line of heavy cargo jets materialized out of the gloom and glided over our heads, with engines throttled back to near-idle and tiny wisps of fog forming at their wingtips in the heavy humidity. Each jet, weighing many tons, passed directly over our heads as if suspended from a dream and then vanished behind the hotel building as it went on to land in a nightly ballet that may very well have no direct parallel anywhere in the world today. What we were watching was not just a series of planes landing, but a multi-dimensional ballet involving hopes, dreams, thousands of years of steady technological advance and even the expression of social and financial systems evolved to a sufficiently high level to allow such a remarkable thing to take place. It was, in a word, incredible.

So, you may well ask, what does Federal Express have to with to do with transformation stories? The key phrase in the above paragraph is "a miracle took place right before our eyes".

As a rule there are four basic transformational devices used in TF literature. These are surgical, magical, technological and biological. Magical TF's can be as unlimited as a writer's imagination, of course, while surgical TF's are almost entirely confined to TG stories. Biological TF's, as epitomized by the well-known "Martian Flu" of the "Blind Pig" universe, generally operate under the guise of contagious diseases. Technological TF's, however, are far more complex and difficult to work with. Creating a technological TF device demands not only that the writer at least deal in passing with the incredibly complex issues of bio-engineering, but also that he seamlessly place these issues within the context of the society that produced such tech. When a writer attempts to write a story with technological TF's, in other words, he has by definition set out to write a work of science fiction rather than one of fantasy; therefore, in order to produce a credible work he simply must meet the very exacting strictures of a good SF tale. This requires discipline, discipline, discipline! However, the results can exceed in scope and impact any other form of artistic expression on the planet, at least in my opinion.

Genuinely superb SF is in my opinion rarer than hen's teeth; the vast majority of what I find on the shelves for sale today in fact makes me want to gag. While there seemingly have been almost as many articles written on the elements of good SF as there have been truly excellent SF tales, and many of these articles make excellent points, I have yet to read any of these "authoritative" pieces that really hits the nail on the head regarding the factor that produces real quality work of the sort that transcends the boundary between simple storytelling and true art. And that boundary, of course, is that the story must make a miracle, a real, genuine, honest-to-God miracle, take place right in front of your eyes.

This is one hell of a challenge for any writer, of course. Ninety-nine or more percent of all SF consists of the simple rehash of old ideas or plots that have been done a million times before. Yet the truly great ones have managed it -- from time to time the impossible has been accomplished and the reader led gently forth to touch the living face of God. It has been done, and can be done again. Heinlein did it in Orphans of the Sky, the very first and original tale about a generation ship lost in space so long that its inhabitants have forgotten they are space travelers. "The universe was three miles long!" declares the blurb on a paperback edition of this work that I own, and for once the blurb-writer has captured the inherent truth of the novel. The universe was only three miles long for the travelers, because the inhabitants had turned inward to superstition and violence instead of outwards towards science and reason. Their universe literally shrank to nothing as their minds closed, and when the viewpoint character finally rejects his religion and looks out upon the naked stars in all their majesty... <shiver> There simply is no more powerful use of metaphor in all of SF. None!

Arthur C. Clarke has taken his readers to see God as well, not once but many times. Perhaps my personal favorite is the story of Alvin of Lorraine in the classic Against the Fall of Night. Alvin lives in a world where humanity is in serious cultural decline, where risk-taking and exploration and even the mere idea of there being anything new or worthwhile to be found in the universe is simply unheard of. He explores the glory of Man's past, and rediscovers a heritage that reaches far beyond the mundane boundaries of his people. (Clarke later rewrote and expanded this novel as The City and The Stars, but I have always preferred the plainer and less embellished original version.)

Another more modern writer who has taken me to unexplored heights is Greg Bear. His Anvil of Stars (sequel to the also-excellent Forge of God) is possibly the single most depressing work I have ever read in my life, yet it is glorious and miraculous nonetheless. It is the tale of a group of children sent forth in an alien-provided starship to avenge themselves upon a people who have utterly destroyed Earth and almost all of mankind. Their society's whole purpose for existence is to seek out and kill these evil beings, and as they get closer and closer to their goal their interpersonal relationships warp more and more out of true until we find ourselves utterly repulsed by the stark, mindless hatred and bloodlust of a tribe of revenge-seeking primitive savages and, even worse, recognizing our own reflections much too clearly in their world. In the end it becomes clear that in order to put paid to the planet-killers (who have killed many other worlds besides ours and will continue to kill others unless stopped), several idyllic and totally innocent races must be exterminated as well: there is simply no other way. Among all the peoples and civilizations who have faced this dilemma, guess who alone is bloodthirsty and heartless enough to do what is needful to bring about victory?

Most articles about writing in general, including those about writing SF, tend to focus on the craftsmanship aspects of writing. Don't repeat words too often, they tell you. Show, don't tell. Use good grammar, and remember always that the all-powerful and all-knowing Bill Gates put a spellchecker on your computer for a reason. But what they will not tell you is that to truly transcend the limits of reality in your reader's mind, you must find and develop a core idea so powerful that it is analogous to plugging a thirty-amp lead into God himself. Even more, your execution of this idea must be in harmonious sympathy with the concept, so that your symbols sing and your metaphors match the greater flow of the tale. I would submit that the technological approach to transformation gives you far and away the greatest opportunity to make this happen, though I could not for the life of me tell you exactly why I think this is so. Perhaps it is that the discipline of thought required by the writing of true SF as opposed to fantasy brings about a pleasing sense of synchronicity on a subconscious level, or perhaps it is just that when writing about advanced tech we simply have to plan our works better and more carefully. But it is true nonetheless, at least in my experience. With almost no exceptions, every TF story I have ever read that could properly be described as being art rather than simple storytelling has been solidly based upon the thoughtful use of a technological-type TF.

So, here is my challenge to you. Make me feel the same way that I felt while watching those spectral planes wafting so effortlessly overhead in Memphis, and I will gladly read your works of fiction forevermore. Make a miracle happen in front of my very eyes, and I will be your slobbering fanboy from now until the end of time. For there was something far more magical than mere magic about those planes lined up so endlessly, a sight that even a few short decades ago was absolutely unimaginable and which would have been regarded as the purest of science fiction. TF tech is inherently no more impossible nor unbelievable, I would submit, than Federal Express. Technology is perhaps the most quintessentially human thing in all of the universe, the aspect of ourselves that most clearly defines us as a species. Nothing based in mere material reality is more clearly proof of who and what we are deep down inside than is our tech. I challenge you to take this thing called tech and run wild with it, to wrestle with this most difficult and most rewarding of TF story types and write a true science-fiction-type TF story with all the discipline and limitations that this style of work implies. After all, you never know. In stylistic limitations you may find true freedom, and in the attempting of something truly difficult you may find inner resources that you never even suspected you had.

Who knows? You might just make a miracle happen.