Just The Caffeine Talking

A Darkling Alumni Magazine

The University of Chicago magazine Web site has the transcript of an interview with me about A Darkling Sea. Enjoy!

No Royal Road

On May 19 the staff of the Tilton Library in Deerfield were kind enough to host me for a reading and brief lecture about my novel A Darkling Sea and my forthcoming book Corsair. If you were at the library, you can probably skip the rest of this 'blog post, but if you're among the seven billion or so people who didn't make it, I'm going to cover the same ground here.

As our economy has shifted from one based on "making stuff" to one based on "making up stuff," we've placed a huge emphasis on creativity. Everybody wants to have a billion-dollar idea before the morning smoke break. A whole industry has emerged, promising to teach people the secrets of creativity.

I'm here to say that's all bunk.

Consider the two novels I've sold. How did they come about?

Well, in the case of A Darkling Sea, there were multiple sources of inspiration. I had an idea for a Star Trek novel about a civilization in an ice-covered ocean. The story would give Captain Kirk (or Picard, or whoever) the moral dilemma that adhering to a doctrine of "noninterference" would mean those beings would never learn about the existence of the rest of the universe. I had the idea of a conflict between two spacefaring cultures on a remote and low-tech planet, inspired by the real life World War I in Africa (because Zeppelins). All those threads came together to make the novel.

Writing A Darkling Sea took several years, because I was writing it on spec (as we say). I had a rough outline, but I wrote the story piecemeal, skipping around as the mood took me. The meant I had to go back and do a huge amount of rewriting once it was pointed out to me that I'd basically left out the middle of the book. My writing workshop colleagues suggested I add a chapter at the beginning, which I later sold as a short story ("The Ocean of the Blind") while I tried to find a publisher for the novel.

By contrast, Corsair began as a short story. Back in 2006 Shimmer announced a pirate theme issue, to be edited by the very talented John J. Adams. I wrote a space pirate story for that magazine, and sold it to them. My agent saw it a few years later and suggested I try to expand it into a novel.

I thought about it for a while, then came up with a clever plot twist which relied on a quirk of orbital dynamics (the Oberth Effect, and that's all I'm saying until the book comes out). This meant that the bulk of the story had to fit into the time-frame of a round trip between the Moon and the Earth. So I had to create a very detailed outline (using the chronology of the Apollo 11 mission as my skeleton), tracking the actions and movements of my characters hour-by-hour over the course of six days.

So, to directly compare the two books. One arose from a variety of sources all stewing together in my brain over several years, the other was based on a story written to fit the requirements of a magazine theme issue. One was written piecemeal following a rough outline, the other was written in straight chronological order following a very detailed outline.

In short, two hard science fiction novels, created within a few years of each other by the same writer, had vastly different origins and were written using substantially different methods.

The idea that one can reduce creativity to a set of rules or habits is absurd. Unless you're keeping the advice so vague as to be useless ("do creative things") the precise method has to vary depending on the project, the person, and the situation. I know writers who compose the entire work mentally before they start typing anything. I know others who churn out a vast amount of stuff and then edit down to the real story. (And I've read others who seem to have skipped the "edit down" part.) "Whatever works" is the only real rule of being creative.

I think that creativity can be learned, but I'm not sure it can be taught. We learn creativity by getting as much experience as we can — both inside and outside our chosen endeavor. A writer has to read a lot, and has to do things other than reading. A painter has to look at a lot of paintings, and look at a lot of real objects.

Having gained an understanding of what good work is, the other half of the learning process is to make your own creations, and figure out how they differ from the things you consider good. This is where editors, workshops, and candid family members can help.

Since I started out talking about how impossible it is to reduce creativity to a set of rules, I'm going to stop giving rules for creativity now. But I hope this look at How We Do It has been instructive.  

Invoco Legem Magicarum!

. . . as Mandrake the Magician used to say.

Kinetic fantasy author Max Gladstone wrote an interesting post about "Magic Systems and the Wizardsroman" on his own blog. He's interested in the connections between story and How Magic Works (that is, how the fictional magic operates within a fantasy story), and it started me thinking about the same subject.

Gladstone very cogently pointed out that different stories use different styles of magic, but I'd like to go a little deeper under the hood and look at why that should be the case. Why don't all fantasies just crib from real-life occultists like Aleister Crowley and his imitators, or the practices of historical witches as described in the Malleus Maleficarum? Or, if those are too boring, just change the names of spells from the Dungeons and Dragons rules. Instead, each author spends a huge amount of effort inventing a new magical mechanic, like the metal-based sorcery Brandon Sanderson created in his Mistborn series. Or invests time and study to learn about an obscure real-world magic tradition, the way Niven and Barnes did for Dream Park.

Here's the secret: fantasy stories aren't about magic, they're about people. Which means the magic in a fantasy story has to affect the characters and their interactions. If the magic is an innate ability (as in J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter novels) then that automatically creates a tension between those who can and those who can't do magic. Even among Rowling's wizards, the central conflict is over their attitude toward the unpowered "Muggles." 

Conversely, if anyone can learn magic, then the focus of the story is what it costs to learn it (as in H.P. Lovecraft's fiction, where the use of supernatural power invariably corrupts and dehumanizes the users), or on the social controls needed to regulate magic (as in Charles Stross's "Laundry" series and most other "occult cop" fiction).

Done right, the specifics of magic become part of the theme of the story. In Rowling's books, magic requires both innate talent and extensive training — the ideal set-up for a story about special wizard kids at school. If magic wasn't an inborn talent, poor Harry would never get called to Hogwarts, and if it didn't require training he wouldn't need to spend seven books studying there.

Circling back to Mr. Gladstone's essay, I'd like to venture the opinion that the rules of magic matter to the reader only to the extent that they matter to the characters. If doing magic requires elaborate ritual and precise actions, then the author should spell out what needs doing and why (or at least suggest it). Conversely, a story of people doing magic through sheer force of will or wild free-form inspiration will necessarily have a more chaotic feel. Like the characters, the reader can't quite be sure when magic is happening or who's doing it.

What about historical magic? That's the sort of thing I enjoy: name-checks of dudes like Apollonius of Tyana, John Dee, and the Comte de Saint-Germain; recognizable magical workings and paraphenalia, and a sense that even the nicest wizards may be damning themselves in their pursuit of supernatural power.  How does that fit into a fantasy story?

Well, "tourism" is a worthwhile element of any fantastic fiction. A science fiction novel with a weird enough setting can coast on that for a considerable distance, and a well-done fantasy can keep the reader entertained with glimpses of real-life magical beliefs in their proper historical context. Or an author with knowledge of a mystical tradition unfamiliar to most readers can get a lot of mileage out of showing off that knowledge. Obviously the key here is that all these things must be done in an entertaining manner, which of course is easier said than done.

Historical magic also lets the author come to grips with real-world issues — and perhaps debunk popular misconceptions. One can even examine hard philosophical or theological questions: is it even possible to be a "good wizard" in an explicitly Christian context? What happens to a genuinely good person who trafficks with genuinely evil spirits? How to reconcile different faiths? 

To sum up, then, the magic in a fantasy story has to serve the needs of the story. One can either custom-design it to fit the story one wishes to tell, or seek out the story possibilities in a pre-existing set of magical beliefs. The same applies to roleplaying games: the magic rules should fit the kind of game you're trying to design. If you want fast-moving action, then spells should be showy and easy to cast; if you want subtle intrigue then they should be complex and hard to detect.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have some fantasy story ideas I need to jot down.

The Madness Returns . . .

. . . to Chicago, as it does each year about this time.

My Northwest Passage

Inhabitants of the upper-left part of the United States (the place where the return address goes) can see me in person, hear me read from A Darkling Sea, and get some books signed next week. There are two stops on this mini-tour:

Powell's Books at Cedar Hills Crossing, in Beaverton, Oregon, on May 13 at 7 p.m. — Note that this is not the original Powell's store in downtown Portland, but their suburban location at the Cedar Hills Crossing shopping center in Beaverton.

University Book Store, in Seattle, Washington, on May 16 at 7 p.m. — This is the flagship UW campus bookstore, so I'll be doing my thing amid purple t-shirts and adorable plush Huskies.

In between those dates I'm going to seek out other bookshops in the area and see if they want me to sign store copies. If anyone has any recommendations, let me know. I'll see you all in the land of geoducks and Microsoft!    

On the Verge of Great Events

Most of us remember history as a series of Big Events: wars, revolutions, inventions, disasters, and so forth. (Historians in recent decades have done an immense amount of really amazing work studying day-to-day life in the past, but nobody seems to pay much attention to them aside from other historians.)

The trouble with Big Events is that we only know after the fact which events are the Big ones. The Protestant Reformation of Luther was a Big Event, but similar insurgencies like that of John Wycliffe were not. 

This means that sometimes people react to little events as if they are Big Events, and later generations laugh at them for their "hysteria" and "over-reaction." The recent "Occupy Wall Street" movement is an example: in 2011 politicians and journalists seized on it as the next great American social/political movement. Three years later it's about as relevant as Disco.

And, of course, often people react to Big Events as if they're just another ordinary thing. We wonder at the way Europeans reacted to the rise of Hitler and the events leading up to World War II — but of course they didn't know Hitler was anything but a crackpot political extremist, nor did they know that the series of crises in Europe during the 1930s were leading up to anything.

This is a common problem in fiction, particularly historical fiction and science fiction. Historical novels often revolve around Big Events of the past, while science fiction stories frequently revolve around Big Events of the future. In both, there's a remarkable tendency for people to know, somehow, which events are the Big ones, even before they happen.

I recall an anthology of alternate-history stories, Alternate Presidents, edited by Mike Resnick; the stories was based on the premise that each of the Presidential elections in the United States had gone the other way, so that people like Thomas Dewey or Henry Clay reached the White House instead of Truman or Polk. 

What struck me on reading Alternate Presidents was how two events — World War II and the American Civil War — tended to "colonize" the decades of history leading up to them. All the alternate Presidencies of the 1840s and 1850s turned into alternate Civil War stories, while most of the elections after 1916 or so turned into alternate World War Two stories. Admittedly, it's more interesting to read about an alternate World War Two than about an alternate Smoot-Hawley Tariff, but nevertheless it was striking to me how those Big Events swallowed up the history around them.

While no doubt a Clay administration in 1844 would very probably have had a big influence on the growing conflict over slavery, at the time politicians had other fish to fry. There was the Oregon Crisis, another round of the Tariff issue, the Mexican War, and various other issues to face. (In fact, one reason that Big Events can get so Big is that people are busy dealing with other matters and simply don't have the attention to spare.)

So I want to urge fiction writers: don't assume your historical characters know (or care) about the Big Events coming up. English farmers in Shropshire probably didn't find out about the Spanish Armada until its ships were rotting on Norwegian beaches, and it's jarring when they act like they're following events on CNN in real time.

But of course not all Big Events happen in fiction. Right now it looks like Russia is fixing to annex another chunk of Ukraine. To students of history it bears a disturbing similarity to the Sudetenland crisis of 1938, in which Germany snapped up bits of Czechoslovakia. Both times the aggressors claimed to be safeguarding minority populations of "their" nationality. In 1938 it ultimately led to Germany swallowing up Czechoslovakia as Europe slid towards war.

In 2014 . . . ? We don't know. This could be the start of a new Cold War, the spark of a hot one, or just another crisis people will barely remember in a couple of years (outside Ukraine, anyway). Will future generations look back and wonder what all the fuss was about, or wonder how we could be so blind?