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25th March 2003: Wittering about writing

Posted on by Jo Walton

Oh, and incidentally, because this is going to sound demented.

You know how there are some characters you keep writing? Who keep coming back in different forms, and want to be written about, like Bottom auditioning for all the parts in the play? There are other characters who are one piece with their world and themselves and couldn’t be anyone else, they’d look down their noses at you if you tried to put them anywhere else. But there are some who are mercury, who keep on trying to be persuasive and want to get in on anything — well, except being a suicidal Narlahenan, for which I had no volunteers at all.

Anyway, when you’re unpublished, you can let them. Why not, after all? Keep trying them out. But when you are published, when you gave them a good job, the most they ought to ask of you is a good character reference when they go off to someone else. You shouldn’t do it. I know it. It’s wrong, it makes everything seem the same.

I understand now why Georgette Heyer had only a small number of male types. She was working with a repetory cast.

There’s a note in my personal Thud file on Tooth and Claw that says “Conal-mou, surely you don’t want to be a dragon?” But yes, he did, and he managed to persuade me he’d make a great dragon. He’s so good at fast talk. He once managed to make me — me! — write a story about Ireland.

So, he’s had parts in all my published fiction. OK. But no more. Enough. Except this morning he keeps hanging around telling me how good he’d be as Jankin. “Jankin’s supposed to be charismatic, and I’m good at charismatic.” “Jankin,” I tell him firmly, “is supposed to be sensible and solid and Western, and you’ve never been sensible in any of your lives, now will you get out of my light and let me see him.” He spreads his hands, dresses himself dead sober in Western fashion, with a hat, from which he quickly hides the feather, using it to paint in a bit of background, an appealing gooseberry bush from the Marches, and says “Well maybe it’s time for me to grow up and try sensible, and have you considered that two women are supposed to fall in love with Jankin? I’m very good, though I says it myself, at getting women to like me. Aren’t you the slightest bit fond of me yourself, woman? Besides, you’ll need me for the dialogue, I can do wicked dialogue, any period you like.”

“Conal-mou, you cannot be Jankin. I can see I can’t manage without you, though the thought appals me, here, you can have the feather back and I’ll find you a part as a painter, and several people can fall in love with you, and there won’t be any angst, which is good, you’ve had a lot of angst after all. And Rysmiel’s evil twin who won’t forgive me for killing you will like it.”

“Killing me? I won’t say I didn’t die by that stream, but it would take more than that to kill me. Doesn’t she know I walked in out of the myth? Doesn’t she know where death is, in a story, isn’t the same, because you can walk round it? And what you were saying about people who don’t come and audition for other parts, they’re the people entirely inside the story, for whom death is death, if they die it. For me, in the myth, in your head, I can see around it like you can, like she ought to be able to, and so I can die, with a lovely speech, and tears from the audience, real tears, and a bit of amazement because they are real tears, and then I hop up again before and elsewhere. I’m less capable of really dying dead than you are, because there’s more of me outside your head than there is of you. Remember when, once, Urdo turned around and spoke to you for a moment, and thought you were Fate? My grandfather and I can see you all the time, and we do our best to get around you. A painter, hey? With a little studio with a rosehedge and a gooseberry bush and a bed?”

“Scene-stealer. Just move over and let me get a clear view of what I need right now, which is Jankin.”

Posted in Lifelode, Writing

22nd February 2003: As you wish

Posted on by Jo Walton

When I was a child, I could run. I haven’t been able to run since I was fourteen or fifteen, because of a trapped nerve in my pelvis after it had been broken, which affected me when I grew.

The house where I was born had a garden, and at the bottom of the garden there was a cemetery, and the wall between was easily climbed up and down, and we would play in the cemetery as if it was more garden. It had wild flowers growing in it, and cultivated flowers cut and put on graves, and it had names of people who had once been alive and played and who were now dead. I’d read the names to my sister and we’d make up stories about them, not ghost stories, adventure stories. We’d often climb up onto a grave and sit and read, or play games in there, the muddled games of childhood where I was forever rescuing princesses from nuclear war or dragons from the Germans.

Beyond the cemetery, which was large, was a common — unenclosed common land, later a housing estate, but then grass and trees and a little stream. The common was called Commonake, which may have come from Common Acre, I don’t know. Beyond the common there was a farm, where we would sometimes go with my grandfather to buy eggs.

It sounds incredibly pastoral when I put it like that, but actually this was all within a mining valley, and around these things were rows and rows of Victorian terraced houses, brick and stone with the brickwork around the houses painted, all dirtied by the smudge of ancestral coal smoke. It was town — villages flowing into town and town flowing into more villages, solid settlement except for the mountain-tops, houses, shops, pit heads, schools, houses, but it was all always run through with wilderness, places to play. When I lived in Shropshire, which was countryside, it was all farmed and there was nowhere to go, no leftover little river valleys full of trees, no bogs, no commons, nowhere to touch the wild. Another place I played as a child was an old ruined ironworks, which became a castle or an Indian fort or the lost city of the Incas without my ever once wondering what a ruined ironworks was doing just sitting there.

The other places were for when I was older and could go off to them, but the cemetery and Commonake were essentially part of our garden, and we played in them from the time were were quite small, and we were only intermittently prevented from going out into them.

I would go down the garden, in a dress, always, I didn’t wear trousers until I was twelve, and after that I didn’t wear a skirt again except under protest until I was quite grown up. On both knees, always, there would be scabs, older or newer, sometimes newer cutting across older. I was forever falling and scraping my knees. I was always tucking my skirt into my knickers when I was damning the stream or climbing trees or mausoleums. Zorinth, at the same age, scraped his knees if he wore shorts and wore through the knees of his trousers because they protected his skin. My knees had to look out for themselves.

My dress would be blue, usually, and my sister’s pink. Occasionally when my grandmother had come across an irresistible bargain in material they’d both be identical. One summer mine was yellow and my sister’s was brown. But generally mine was blue, and whatever blue it started off it would soon be faded.

I’d climb over the wall, slipping down among the graves and the overgrown grass. The cemetery would be mown twice a summer, between times the grass could get really high, with rose-bay-willow-herb in it, or speedwell, or poppies and cornflowers, and the long grass was so long and I was so small that sometimes it came to my waist. I would stand for a moment, and then I would run, run flat out, weaving between the gravestones, my feet coming down hard and sure (and it didn’t hurt a bit) my arms outstretched, my hair perpetually straggling undone from its plaits and flying out in the wind, the world’s wind and the wind of my running.

There’s a way of moving you only do when you run, a tilt to your body, you run with your whole body, every muscle, every hair, and it isn’t just the feet going down and down and down in a rhythm as you fling yourself forwards and catch yourself over and over, there’s a way of breathing that comes all through you, it’s everything together through the long grass and the flowers and hair being blown back and wind and sunshine.

It isn’t a way of running that wins races or gets you anywhere, it’s running for the sheer joy of being alive and able to run, and I daresay nobody over the age of twelve runs like that anyway, even if there is nothing in the world that would prevent them.

Posted in Among Others, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face, My Books

11th February 2003: Thoughts on Fantasy

Posted on by Jo Walton

Probably the worst piece of writing advice I have ever heard in my entire life, including time spent on rec.arts.sf.composition, was a professional writer advising people wishing to write fantasy to watch people roleplaying to get an idea of how magic works.

I didn’t strangle this woman, and Steve Brust, who was there, didn’t strangle her either, though it was a close thing when she held to it through anything and everything.

The main reason it’s a terrible idea, in case it isn’t immediately obvious, is that RPGs are a simulation of a certain kind of fantasy, and that if you use magic the way they do, you’ll end up with stories just like that kind of fantasy — third artist copies. This is the best you can hope for, if you watch a good group playing a good game well. Far more likely you’ll end up with the sort of story where the research shows, and anyway you’ll see people who do indeed take magic for granted, but take it for granted in a game/rules way utterly unlike any attitude anyone would have to real magic but much like the attitude people have to computers — you click on the bunny, something happens and usually it does what you want but maybe it occasionally crashes.

Real people who believe in magic don’t act like this, whether they’re modern or historical.

There’s also a problem with looking at historical attitudes to magic and using them.

Magic in the real world doesn’t actually work. I got flamed to a crisp for saying this on one of the frp newsgroups, so let me back up on that slightly — magic in the real world doesn’t work by RPG rules and it doesn’t work in the kind of reliable way one might want it to in a fantasy novel. Actually I think magic in the real world works amazingly well on the inside of people’s heads, but there are precious few fireballs or healing spells. And seeing how people who believed in magic reacted to unreliable magic doesn’t tell you much about the way they would react to reliable magic.

When it does work, well, when Ken and I were doing the research for GURPS Celtic Myth (a roleplaying game supplement, back in print and available from SJ Games, good game shops, and Amazon) I was thinking about the magic system in great depth, and I was thinking about the Celtic magic trees, and I realised as a revelation that magic in their world was actually a way of doing science. When it worked, it worked scientifically — I mean when Willow worked to heal, it was the aspirin in it, and when Elder did, it was the genuine medicinal properties in elder flowers, berries and bark. It’s an amazing tree. I’d have made it a magic healing tree myself.

So when you look at the historical attitude to magic that did work you’re learning something about the beginning of science but not really about magic.

I did some complicated things about this in the Sulien’s world, in which magic relates to the gods, and is commonplace and taken largely for granted. There are charms, which invoke a desire on the part of the person, and which are powered by a god. If the god won’t play, they don’t work, but usually the gods do. People have to learn the charm, so they are more or less widespread, but once they know it they know it. There’s another kind of magic, called sorcery, which is fuelled by one’s own will, and which slowly destroys the sorceror’s soul. I have two people who are sorcerors, and I haven’t written it but I know exactly how they got like that.

Anyway, I’m very comfortable with what I did with that, and the attitude to magic there. It works for me.

In my dragon book, there essentially isn’t any magic. Magic is only a handwave to make the whole thing work, and the attitude towards it is the Victorian one, pretty much.

I’m now thinking about a medieval world with lots of reliable magic everyone can use, and what it does to it. In the three books in Sulien’s world, I used the gods behind the magic to keep a sense of the numinous. Here, magic wouldn’t have that backing. But it needs something or it isn’t magic, it’s proto-science or alchemy, or it’s dull. Magic needs to be magical, it needs awe. It needs to be as real as the bucket of milk with the cream settling out, as real as the sunshine on the tiles of the floor, it’s the reason the milk doesn’t need to be covered and there’s no dust-motes dancing in the beam, but the way people feel about that, if it worked reliably, would be much the same as the way I wipe my monitor.

Ho hum, maybe they need to do something to be able to do it?

We’ll see.

Posted in Lifelode, My Books, Writing

9th February 2003

Posted on by Jo Walton

My grandparents got married in 1938. I wasn’t born until 1964, but nevertheless as they brought me up I absorbed this story from them, of the summer before the war. 1939, of course. The war began in September. Everyone had expected war in 1938, but Chamberlain had gone to Munich and averted it, “I have here a piece of paper,” my grandfather would sniff at politicians he disapproved of.

They’d got married in the safety of an averted crisis, and they’d had that one astonishing summer, the summer of 1939, when the sun shone every day, they had two people’s income and no children yet, a house of their own, and they could start to buy things. “Oh, we bought that the summer before the war,” they would say, fondly, of tchotchkes and useful things. It was the summer before rationing, before austerity, after the Depression, when they had their health and strength amid plenty.

They could go on trips, they went to Devon, to Lynton and Lynmouth, which I swear must have sunk under the sea in WWII because I only ever heard about them as a lost paradise. There was nothing to prevent us going back, but we never did. I still have never been there, though I have heard so much about that one holiday there. When we were clearing out my grandfather’s things after his death, we found the receipts from the hotel they stayed in, preserved through three moves, fifty years, a war.

The summer of 2001, Rysmiel and I got married. Zorinth was the best man. Friends came from seven countries, including several from the US. It was a halcyon day in Hay on Wye, the town of books, the sun shone. At the end of August, we went to Philadelphia, which we told people was our honeymoon, but was actually Worldcon. (It was amazing how quite sensible people would accept the concept of a trip to Philadelphia for a honeymoon.) We came back exactly a week before the towers fell.

Indeed, a few days after they fell, I went into my local post-office in Swansea and the people there were delighted that I was safe. They’d known I was in America, and not seen me since my return, and America for them and for me had become those falling towers. It was wonderful to be able to remember that it was also Worldcon, a trip with Jon Singer to see a botanical garden, beautiful sushi, the summer before the…

The ladies in the post office asked me to tell my friends in the US that they were thinking of them. I think I was the only person they knew who had friends in the US, the only person who posted things from there to New York — which I did fairly regularly sending things to Tor. They wanted a personal connection and I was the best they could manage. I posted their message on rasseff, what else could I do?

I grew up far more in the shadow of WWII than people who were brought up by people the age of my parents, because my grandparents brought me up. So it’s natural that it was 1939 I thought of. Also the fall of the towers made me think of the Blitz, it would have to. Anyway, people are notoriously always ready for the last war, and that was, emotionally, for me, the last war. But it helps to know which side you are.

Everything went weird. It’s not 1939, when one could honestly, as Orwell put it, fight for the bad against the worse. We’re being asked to fight unjust colonial wars, to no clear purpose, foreign adventures that do not have to do with the attack. The enemy is nebulous. It is the twenty-first century. There are times to fight and times to think and times to wonder why you’re being lied to. I’m not a pacifist. I’d have fought in WWII. I said that peace is a complex thing and sometimes it takes fighting to get it, and I mean that. But I need more of a justification for war than this.

The thing is that the justfication is there and the war is there and they’re not connected, and the whole thing gets blurred in the rhetoric, and then where are you? Is the side we’re being asked to fight for in fact the worse? Do we have any right to be involved in this?

Most of the time I try to go along not thinking about it, because thinking about it is so overwhelmingly awful that it knocks me flat.

Isaac had a fascinating pacifist Erasmus quote in his LJ which I think applies very well to people starting unjust wars for their own advantage — Hitler, in 1939; Jameson in 1895; Bush, now.

“If I am truly that peace so extolled by God and by men; if I am really the source, the nourishing mother, the preserver and the protector of all good things in which heaven and earth abound; if, without me, no prosperity can endure here below; if nothing pure or holy, nothing that is agreeable to God or to men can be established on earth without my help; if, on the other hand, war is incontestably the essential cause of all the disasters which fall upon the universe and this plague withers at a glance everything that grows; if, because of war, all that grew and ripened in the course of the ages suddenly collapses and is turned into ruins; if war tears down everything that is maintained at the cost of the most painful efforts; if it destroys things that were most firmly established; if it poisons everything that is holy and everything that is sweet; if, in short, war is abominable to the point of annihilating all virtue, all goodliness in the hearts of men, and if nothing is more deadly for them, nothing more hateful to God than war—then, in the name of this immortal God I ask: who is capable of believing without great difficulty that those who instigate it, who barely possess the light of reason, whom one sees exerting themselves with such stubbornness, such fervor, such cunning, and at the cost of such effort and danger, to drive me away and pay so much for the overwhelming anxieties and the evils that result from war—who can believe that such persons are still truly men?”
—Desiderius Erasmus

And we, the ordinary people, like my grandparents, like all of us all over the world, are the corporals and privates without whom, Tolstoy says, Napoleon’s army would never have marched.

There may be need for a war that will turn our lives over, and there may be need for it over the cause of September 11th, but this Iraq adventure isn’t that war.

I refuse it, as the ordinary German people who got married after Munich and equally enjoyed that summer of 1939 should have refused the Polish adventure.

Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

24th January 2002: My Ranking of Heyer

Posted on by Jo Walton

Dionywas asking about which Heyer were good ones to try. I think this depends a lot on who you ask and what you like. When I was asking about this I found that ones some people loved were ones others especially hated.

Now, I do not read romances generally, I despise Barbara Cartland, I yawn at Madeleine Brent and anything with a cover showing a heroine swooning makes me look for something with an exploding spaceship. I have however read a number of romance novels when I was too young to know better, and since that I have read some by people who have written other things too, mostly Joan Aiken, I’ve read almost all of Aiken. Aiken’s Regencies are, well, different, and I can’t believe they let her get away with the end of An Embroidered Sunset. She’s just in her own class.

I started reading Heyer because of conversations like this on rasfw:

Someone: “Shards of Honor is just like a romance novel!”

Me: “Where are the romance novels that are like Shards of Honor?”

Lis Carey or some other rational person: “Georgette Heyer.”

After sufficient repetition, I kept on not reading any. I finally picked up some Heyer when someone told me Heyer was trying to write more Jane Austen novels. I don’t know what made them think that, but anyway, the imagined combination of more Jane Austen and Shards of Honor was enough to make me get one out of the library and I’m glad I did. They rapidly became comfort reads.

However, while Heyer writes wonderful repartee, I think she is at her best with a plot in which nothing much happens, she wasn’t good with drama. A dog loose in a park, yes, but not a battle or exciting adventures. She was terrible with villains, but good with awful aunts. My favourites of her novels tend to be the less eventful.

My ranking of Heyer would go like this:

A Civil Contract
About a million miles ahead of all the others. This is a book with no romance, indeed, in which the dopey romance would have been a terrible idea. There’s a lot of love in it, though. It’s the “It doesn’t change a thing, but even so, after twenty-five years, it’s nice to know” kind of love, rather than the whirlwind kind. It also has nicely measured plot, exquisite sensibility, and macaroons. It has all Heyer’s types, and does lovely things with them.

Excellent
The Grand Sophy
Wonderful repartee, a plot in which very little happens but all of it on oiled wheels, matchmaking, and a monkey.
The Unknown Ajax
“He had imperceptibly become indispensible to her comfort.”
Cotillion
In which she managed to surprise me with the resolution. And the hero is just lovely. This is another one like tGS in which the heroine matchmakes.
Venetia
The only “damsel marries rake” novel I’ve ever read in which I can believe in the happiness of their subsequent marriage.
Frederica
Beautiful repartee, a balloon ride and a Baluchistan hound.
The Corinthian
If the world needed one novel about a heroine running away disguised as a boy and travelling with the hero without realising she’d fallen in love with him, this would be it.
Sprig Muslin
And if the world needed one novel about a hero beset with a would-be heroine while loving the sensible woman he was supposed to marry, this would be that one.
Sylvester
I cannot believe the protagonists will ever do anything but bicker, but nevertheless the style with which they bicker makes up for a great deal. Also, virtually the only Heyer heroine with even a pretence at being capable of making her own living.
The Foundling
This is different from most of Heyer’s novels, even those it closely resembles, by being a coming of age novel.

Good
Arabella
A little too saccharine, but still amusing.
Black Sheep
An older heroine and a reformed rake.
The Nonesuch
Memorable for having a heroine who is a governess.
Devil’s Cub
Sequel to These Old Shades but it would be better if it weren’t.
Regency Buck
Again, a bit saccharine and it’s all so predictable, but still worth reading.
False Colours
Has the best awful old woman in all of Heyer, and Heyer was terrific at awful old women. This is the one the sig I had for a long time on alt.poly came from.
Charity Girl
Same plot as Sprig Muslin and The Foundling, but feels more like it’s just going through the motions.
April Lady
I wish the heroine wasn’t such a wimp.
Bath Tangle
The heroine is deeply unlikable, but I did like the tangle and the resolution of it.
Friday’s Child
I would like this book a lot if I could believe in the marriage as a marriage. I find it very hard to suspend my disbelief where there are people who are married for quite a while, and sleeping together, but who are moved to orgasm by a kiss with feeling. I was going along fine with this book until the morning after the wedding where nothing whatsoever has changed between them. This is also a problem with April Lady. I know Heyer didn’t want to write about sex — she could, she kept writing into the sixties, but she didn’t want to, and that’s OK, but other people before her time wrote books in which sex existed and had effects even if it wasn’t described as a graphic act. (Rebecca, 1938, Purposed of Love, 1938) A Civil Contract has offstage but plausible sex for that matter.

Poor
The Masqueraders
Too much plot and all totally implausible.
Powder and Patch
I didn’t believe it. Dull.
These Old Shades
Tortured plot.
The Reluctant Widow
Gothic implausible plot.
Faro’s Daughter
Dull. Heroine does have a profession, though.
The Toll Gate
Idiotic smuggling plot, barely visible romance.
Cousin Kate
Gothic and over the top.
The Convenient Marriage
Silly. But some brilliant dialogue in the first chapter.
The Quiet Gentleman
Gothic and implausible.
Lady of Quality
Dull.

Awful
An Infamous Army
Out of her depth. A sort of sequel to Devil’s Cub and Regency Buck, and at its best when it is being. The version of the battle of Waterloo is painful — I don’t doubt it’s accurate, but goodness me what a way to try to write it! I wonder why she didn’t write more sequels, or at least roman a fleuve, give people bit parts in other novels? Oh well.
Simon the Coldheart
Historical. Ghastly.
The Conqueror
I couldn’t finish this one.
My Lord John
I couldn’t finish this one either. Medieval in all senses. Forsoothly.
Royal Escape
Also painfully forsoothly.


Even so, I’ve read all of them at least twice but the Awful section and Powder and Patch, which I left in a cottage in Scotland to add to the bookshelf of books people had left.

Posted in Books

7th January 2002: Genre conventions

Posted on by Jo Walton

Sarah Monette was writing in her journal about Bujold and Sayers, and what A Civil Campaign doesn’t do that Gaudy Night does, and a conversation following on from that.

There are genre conventions, there are subversions of genre conventions, and there are good intentions that get nowhere because there are genre necessities that don’t seem to allow them. The problem is that genre conventions dictate a whole lot of things about the shape of the possible story, and you have to get right outside that if the thing you want to talk about is something else, and when you get outside it you might have Gaudy Night but equally you might have a handful of shapeless mush because it is genre conventions that provide the support structure that stops everything happening at the same time and lets you have story.

Le Guin has been driving me mad for years by saying women’s work is important and showing it as being actually very dull with nothing happening. I wrote a poem about this which I posted on rasfw in May 2001 and shall reproduce here as it’s actually easier to type it in than work out the Google url properly:

You say there are no stories in happiness
only the fire burning, the bucket in the well,
the wind in the gables, the crops ripening.
You try to tell those stories and they fall in your hands
into unpatterned incident. The shape of doing
again what was done before is not story-shape
though you have tried and come close.

Stop and be quiet. Listen to the rustling.
Stop looking for invasions and evil wizards.
Until you can see the shapes that life makes
ripening into stories worth your telling
the words that you say are only air
and neither life nor stories have the value
your words say you set upon them.

But now I think about this in the light of A Civil Campaign and Gaudy Night and genre conventions, I wonder if it’s the genre conventions pressing too hard around the outside. I still think Always Coming Home would have been a much better story (would have been a story rather than what’s essentially a bizarre RPG worldbook) if it had been about someone middle aged and in love with someone not in love with them and their child coming towards their nameday and maybe an argument about what to do with a tree that had fallen down. But I don’t think that story was visible to her, even if I can see it as a possible way out of what she had. Kim Stanley Robinson did it with Pacific Edge, and Eleanor Arnason does it all the time. So it’s possible to do in genre. (McHugh too, though not always coherently. Really well, but that’s different.)

This may be why The Dubious Hills has such an absurdly simple plot, and a plot which, to me, thinking about the book, always comes as an afterthought. It’s drawing water and lighting fires and living quietly and a fascinating world, and it has plot because something has to happen in a story, dammit.

I don’t think I let genre conventions beat me bloody this time, but it’s very hard to be sure. I think maybe they did a bit in terms of how much more prominence my totally standard relationship gets over the others.

Posted in Books, Lifelode, Writing

6th January 2003: Time and the bell have buried the day

Posted on by Jo Walton

You can define a culture by cultural referents the members of the culture have in common. Quick, if someone mentions Cordelia’s attitude towards death, are they talking about Shakespeare, Bujold, or Buffy?

History is so vast, so multi-layered, so complex. The idiotic protagonist of Tarr and Turtledove’s Household Gods, finding herself transported from modern LA to Carnuntum in the era of Marcus Aurelius, remarked that she would have thought she was at the beginning of history, but lots of history appeared to have happened already.

All human culture has been as complex, as richly textured, as ours, with its stories, its immediate and distant pasts. It hasn’t all been as diffuse, within the one culture, I don’t think. It isn’t possible to know what the reader might bring to a reading, there’s just too much. It may not even be possible to have a rough circle of the possible to know where they might be standing.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to have a conversation. But it can be difficult to keep aware of the time between, to mind the gaps.

Rysmiel remarked that maybe people who didn’t spend all day working with taxonomies wouldn’t find the taxonimical bit of Moby Dick thighslappingly funny.

I just absently assured someone that if she was thinking Geoffrey’s mention of Brut meant he’d read Homer, it didn’t, it likely meant he had an educated familiarity with Virgil. I forgot that I do not live in a world in which everyone has read Geoffrey of Monmouth, or even one in which everyone would casually recognise his name. To say what I wanted to say properly would have taken me half an hour, and without cues as to what she does know, it still might not have been comprehensible.

Eliot’s “time and the bell” have always, for me, brought an image from The Magician’s Nephew, the waking of Jadis in the hall of the dead on Charn. That novel hadn’t even been written when he wrote the poem.

Yet you have to make assumptions, have to start somewhere, have to hope for comprehensibility.

There’s a space you shape when you write, between you and the reader, and you’re only in control of one side of that space. When the reader moves too far away from where you were expecting, the shape of the space changes. When the reader moves far enough, you’re incomprehensible, or at least, you need a structure of footnotes and appendices to prop you up.

It’s strange, if I have faith, it is faith in discourse, in conversation. Yet it will lurch under me. There is so much I don’t know, have no apprehension of. But even so, to talk to perfectly intelligent people about things I want to talk about, I often have to start so far back that it isn’t possible to get to where I want to go on from.

There are places it just isn’t possible to get to, especially if it requires more than one thing. We are all mini-cultures of ourselves, really.

It’s not that I feel lonely as much as that I feel fragmented.

His grave is narrow
it’s long
after a time
with his host
for so long,
the grave of Meigen
the son of Rhun
the leader of many.

In my beginning is my end.

Posted in Human culture

5th January 2003: What a Bildungsroman isn’t

Posted on by Jo Walton

A bildungsroman is, of course, no more than a coming of age novel, but I didn’t know that. When I was fifteen or sixteen, I read Doris Lessing’s Martha Quest series, which begins in Zimbabwe immediately before WWII and continues (five books later) on from Martha coming to London in 1949 to being there in 1959 and 1969 and into the imagined created future. Five books into the series, towards the end of The Four Gated City, it turns into SF.

Lessing used the word “bildungsroman” in the introduction to the library hardback The Four Gated City which I first read, which said something like (paraphrased) “people have said this series is a bit strange, but actually it’s just a bildungsroman”. I’d only read one other book which was set in a specific time and place and which in order to deal with the ramifications of plot in the future extended on into an imagined future, Graves’s Antigua, Penny, Puce which does this on the last page and as a joke. However, as this was the thing that struck me as weird about this book, I imagined that this was what Lessing had meant, and that there was a whole German genre of the things, realistic novels that became SF through the necessity of the characters growing older and time not having got there yet. I thought Lessing was saying that this may be a weird thing to do in English, but people are always doing it in German.

I’d only read one German novel at that point, Kafka’s The Castle (yes, but I prefer oranges) and while it didn’t do that particular thing, I could quite see how German literature was clearly given to weirdnesses undreamed of in English.

It took me a Goethe and two Thomas Mann’s, which I don’t suppose did me any harm, even approached in such a wrong spirit, before I gave up trying the German-lit-in-translation shelf of the library. (I did discover Rilke, so it wasn’t all time wasted.)

I felt a keen sense of disappointment when I discovered what a bildungsroman actually was. I had really wanted there to be books out there, maybe, preferably even, written a long time ago, which were written with the layered depth of characterisation and detail expected of mainstream fiction, but which extended onwards into an SFnal and precisely imagined future.

I’ve argued elsewhere that what makes a novel SF is largely pacing, that genres have their own different expectations of pace and that this is one of the things that mainstream writers inevitably get wrong when attempting SF. It’s what’s wrong with Piercy’s He, She and It (aka Body of Glass) frex, which uses SF furniture creditably but can’t be read as SF. And it’s why Simmons’s Phases of Gravity reads like SF even though it isn’t.

I’d just have been so interested to read a whole genre of novels with mainstream sensibility that had the courage to go on beyond the present when the now of the story did. It’s such a pity they never existed except in my imagination.

I never refer to coming of age novels as bildungsromans. I regard it as a term likely to confuse people.

Posted in Books, Writing

17th December 2002: Human Civilization

Posted on by Jo Walton

There’s an exhibition in the Pointe Calliere Museum of History and Archaeology in the Old Port in Montreal, called “Varna”. It’s on tour from a museum in Varna, Bulgaria, and covers the history of Varna back to about eight thousand years ago.

Varna is Roman Odessos, on the Black Sea, in Thrace or Moesia Inferior, for people (like me) who haven’t been keeping up with more recent historical changes to geography. It’s right up by the Danube.

The exhibition goes backwards through time. It begins with two pairs of bracelets, one pair from 1400, the other from -4,700, then it takes you backwards through the Medieval period when Varna was part of the Ottoman Empire and before that the Byzantine, and then into Late Antiquity, when it was over-run with Bulgars and Avars, with their beautiful horse armour and belts with embroidery and carvings. They’re wonderul and mysterious and barbaric, and they followed the Visigoths across the Danube and nothing was the same after.

Then we went back before them, through the Roman period. It was interesting to see all of this, especially to consider how the pots and jugs and lamps of Roman and sub-Roman Varna are the same as the ones from Britain of the same period that I’m really familiar with. Almost all the physical objects in the King’s Peace world are actual real objects from museums somewhere… though I didn’t put the Roman Swiss Army Knife, from the Fitzwilliam in Cambridge in, though I was longing to, because I knew nobody would believe it. It had a pair in this exhibition, there were lots of Roman medical tools (which instantly made me homesick for Gillian Bradshaw’s The Beacon at Alexandria, for which they were exactly period, and a manicure set, bronze, connected on an ivory ring.

Then came the Greek period, the Greek colony in Thrace, on the edge of civilization. There were some lovely statues of the gods, including the most three-fold Hecate I have ever seen, with six arms like Siva, with three faces, two in silhouette, and holding torches, with her dog at her feet, in bas-relief. There was also black and red figure ware. I still felt I knew where I was, in my comfortable familiar world that centres on the Mediterranean.

Then we went back to Thrace — this section was illustrated with quotations from Herodotus about the Thracians, and heads of ancient goddesses whose names are forgotten, and pots with figures of horses. Goddess figures, big-bellied, with breasts and vaginas and some with no heads — the sign says they’re fertility figures, but I wonder if they’re porn. They’re the shape I am. Rysmiel says they’re beautiful. Pots, more broken pots, not painted now, on backwards through the Iron Age, with some Phoenecian glass, and back into the Bronze Age, they sent people to fight at Troy, and a huge pig of copper, they had native copper, pots that seem amazingly sophisticated for how old they are, four thousand, five thousand years old, made when wheels were new.

After that, you go behind a curtain, and discover Copper Age Varna, before bronze, before wheels, the pots are twisted and pressed, when the native copper at Varna was a treasure that brought them goods up from the Mediterranean. Before the Pyramids were built, they were mining copper and making copper tools and trading them for shells and gold. There was gold here, gold cows with horns that were once sewn on to clothing, gold rings and necklaces of tiny rings, and tiny rings and shells. The tools were stone and copper, and they have found hundreds of graves, the men laid on their backs, the women curled on their sides facing towards the dawn, all richly accompanied with their goods from their life. They have learned so much about early copper working from these graves, and they date from -4,200 back.

Last, around one last corner, there is the oldest grave. In it, all the tools are stone. This is a neolithic burial, but among the stone tools are some shells, from the Mediterranean, trade goods, and beads of copper, used and valued for decoration before it was of any use, and one tiny bracelet worth of tiny gold rings, perhaps a couple of millimetres across each, thirty-five of them. They date from before -4,800 before the walls of Sumer were built, and they are the oldest worked gold in the world.

They were people, trading, making beautiful and useful objects, tending their dead and their living, with a very low life expectancy — 25 years by one calculation, reaching 40 was rare. (Though bone dating is far from an exact science, as was proved recently when they tested the techniques on a C.18 cemetery in London.) There they were, up on the Danube, with native copper, with the desire to adorn themselves, with cows, with mattocks and adzes and axes for work, with lives and deaths that can speak to us only through their artifacts, before history, but after thousands of years of pre-history of which we know, and can know, nothing whatsoever.

If there were a catastrophe now, Zorinth’s dad said, they would excavate this and say that in the late C.21 there was trade between Bulgaria and Quebec, but we don’t know what they traded, apart from archaeological items.

The copper beads were green with oxide. The bones could not speak, except to say there was someone here who lived and breathed and spoke and died beloved. The gold still shone, silent. Only the shells were eloquent of their origin, whispering to us of trade.

Make records. Remember everything and write it down, and tell what’s important to your children. Use as many alphabets as you can. Landfill broken things, never incinerate them. Practice burial, not cremation. There will come a time when we are dust, and people will look at our precious objects in museums and marvel that we lived and loved and touched what we touch and cared for what we care for. Let there be names and poetry to set beside them when that day comes.

Posted in Human culture, Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face

16th December 2002: Just Like a Fairytale

Posted on by Jo Walton

A few years ago there was an ad for a credit card, in which someone struggles through various difficulties which were ennumerated financially (flight from Heathrow to Inverness, $500, Taxi to wherever, $70) to get home, where, when he was greeted by his small child it said “Getting there for Christmas, priceless.”

Then, more traditionally, there’s the pantomime Cinderella, miraculously arrayed in finery and told she shall go to the ball, and all the children in the audience ooh and aah at the transformation and her chance to have her dreams come true.

Zorinth’s dad arrived on Thursday night, very late. He’d left Exeter at 3am on Wednesday, and come via Gatwick and Minneapolis. He’s here until the 29th, when he’s going home through Detroit and Amsterdam.

Zorinth is really really pleased to see him.

We have put up lights on the balcony. We have put up the Christmas tree, using amazing Canadian Christmas Tree Stand technology, which is orders of magnitude better than the traditional British bucket and stones method. We’ve noted that the fir is a different species from either of the standard British species of trees. When we came to decorate the tree, with our traditional decorations, some of them dating from immediately after WWII, and some of them dating from every year since, up to this year, we found that the place where the fairy sits has handlebars of fir for her to hold onto.

Rysmiel has said how nice it is to have Zorinth’s dad here. They get on well together. We’ve been shopping, together and separately, and we’ve bought lots of presents. We’ve been to see the astonishing Gold of Varna exhibition at the Archaeological museum. We’ve eaten Korean food and crepes and fondue and made plans to have friends round at various times over the holidays.

And Zorinth’s dad is here, so this doesn’t have to be Zorinth’s first Christmas without him ever. They’re in Zorinth’s room playing Nomad Soul together.

Thank you, Redbird. I don’t suppose you want the tutu and the magic wand, or even the spot on the tree with the handlebars, but you’re definitely the fairy godmother of this particular Chistmas.

Posted in Life as it blossoms out in a jar or a face