Work In Progress: Corsair (Part 2)

As I mentioned previously, Corsair had its origin in a short story for a pirate-themed anthology. So when I began to expand it into a novel, one of my guiding principles was that it had to remain a pirate story -- even though it's about a nerdish spacecraft hijacker 17 years in the future.

This in turn made me think about pirate stories, and what I realized is that most pirate stories aren't about piracy. Even the greatest classic of the genre, Treasure Island, isn't so much about pirating as about the aftermath. Even in pirate movies, the piracy mostly happens off-screen, as in Errol Flynn's Captain Blood, where the eponymous Captain's career as a pirate is crammed into a brief montage.

The most famous pirate film of recent years, Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean, subverts the whole thing even more: it's about a band of pirates who are obsessively recovering stolen gold in order to put it back where they found it.

How did this happen? How can one have a genre in which the ostensible subject matter hardly ever comes up? It would be as if all Westerns wound up being set in New England or something. 

I think the tension in pirate fiction derives from two facts: 1) People think pirates were cool and romantic, and 2) Pirates were a horrible bunch of amoral sociopaths. The modern pirates of Somalia are following exactly in the tradition of their Jolly Roger predecessors, except that they use motorboats and AK-47s instead of fast sloops and cutlasses. So unless one wants to create a work of fiction which realistically depicts a bunch of amoral sociopaths in action (and now I wish someone would hire Quentin Tarantino to make a pirate movie), you kind of have to soft-pedal the looting, raping, and murdering in favor of rope-swinging stunts and buried chests of gold.

For Corsair I have tried to have my cake and eat it, too. David Schwartz really is an amoral sociopath -- and his eventual redemption is ultimately driven by the stripping away of all his romantic fantasies and self-justification.

But I also wanted to work in as many pirate movie cliches as possible. So there's the pirate haven of Tortuga (now a Disneyesque theme resort), a sea battle, a secret island, a rescue, a buried treasure, a duel (waged with keyboards instead of cutlasses), and an eyepatched villain. If I could figure out how to have someone swing on a rope at a key moment, I'd do it.

    

Comments

[Dwtwiddy]

Yep. I ran smack into this when I sat down to write my pirate novel. People like the idea of pirates because it's an idea of freedom, of not having a boss. Books on pirates often stress the cooperative, egalitarian nature of pirate crews. They skim over the parts regarding just what those crews were egalitarianly cooperating to do-or what it must have been like to be living in a small Caribbean settlement when all these men with guns landed.